Bill Sykes' Newsletter
from America.
(September 2003)
An ex-Brit gives his views-(without fear
or favor)---of the American Scene
The East Coast power outage.
The largest electrical power outage in American
history blacked out portions of eight American States,
which included New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, and Massachusetts, and the
Canadian Province of Ontario, affecting nearly sixty million
people.
The occurrence at around 4.00pm EST on Thursday the 14th
of August 2003, paralysed many major cities on the north
east coast of America, and the Canadian cities of Toronto
and Ottawa.
The city of Detroit, a major producer of automobiles,
had to shut down its production plants and apparently
was one of the last cities to get their power back.
 There
have been three major power outages in the United States,
1965, 1977, and the current one. During the 1977 blackout
looting and violence occurred and hundreds of stores were
set on fire - fortunately the current blackout was handled
extremely well by the people affected and if one can single
out any particular section of the affected American public
then the citizens of New York must be highly commended
and congratulated for their handling of what could have
been a very volatile and difficult situation. I cannot
say that New Yorkers are some of my favourite people but
give credit where credit is due and in this particular
incident they certainly kept their "cool" in
a situation where high temperatures were one of the least
of their worries.
This major shut down affected practically every entity
dependent upon electrical power, trains, planes, and practically
every other mode of transportation, automobile manufacturing
plants, Metro system subways, traffic lights, water pumping
stations, sewage plants, gas stations, even Wall Street.
Hospitals, fortunately in most cases have generator back-up
systems.
Now we get to the blame game. The United States, as we
were reminded by one Canadian official is generally loath
to take the blame if that is possible for most occurrences
but to everyone’s surprise they recently stated
that they believe that the initial shutdown can be attributed
to the failure of three power transmission lines located
in northern Ohio.
 It
has been suggested that the outage originated when a power
company in northern Ohio started to import electricity
from other parts of the Eastern grid to a overcome an
over supply demand which created a massive overload. The
national power grid system covers three main areas, the
Eastern zone, (Central America to the East coast), the
Western zone, (Central America to the West coast), and
Texas. Later reports suggested that a tree fell on power
lines near Cleveland and caused the outage.
Surely one tree couldn’t cause such a catastrophic
occurrence. Who’s kidding who.
From that moment onwards the shut down spiralled out
of control, and in nine seconds the whole of the northeast
grid system experienced a major loss of electrical power.
First Energy Company of Ohio admitted that critical alarms
systems failed, or were inactive at the time of the overload.
 Critics
of the American electrical power generating system have
stated that in their opinion the United States has a third
world antiquated electrical power generating system which
badly needs to be upgraded in order to cover the ever
increasing demand for electrical power. It has been estimated
that cost of upgrading the present system would be in
the region of fifty billion dollars. Secretary of Energy
Spencer Abrahams is immediately convening a joint task
force to enquire into the exact cause of the problem and
what can be done in future to avoid such a catastrophic
loss of electrical power.
We welcome feedback about any of the contents
of these newsletters. Please send all correspondence to
bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk
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