Northeastern U.S. and Canada, 2003
Photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein, Corbis
On August 15, 2003, a mass of New York commuters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot during a blackout that robbed 50 million people of power for as long as two days in southeastern Canada and the Northeastern United States. It also crippled all trains, stranding many travelers. The U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force determined that equipment failures and human error had combined to cause the blackout, which started when power lines shut down after contact with trees.
An improving ability to monitor the exact condition of the power system at any given instant with voltage and current sensors, and to make rapid changes like taking lines out of service, is critical to avoiding the cascading effects that lead to widespread outages like the 2003 event.
"If something goes wrong and an ice storm brings down a line or someone blows up a transmission tower that will propagate a disturbance and we need to know exactly how far it propagates and exactly what it looks like—like the ripples of a pebble dropped into a pond, so that we can take a definitive corrective action," said EPRI's Clark Gellings. "When that capability doesn't exist, like it didn't in 2003 in the United States, the system is set up for some kind of failure."
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