blackout (Page 2)

“We’re a superpower with a third world grid,” said former energy secretary Bill Richardson in an interview on CNN. Third world countries can’t figure out why Thursday’s power blackout spread so wide and lasted so long. They have blackouts all the time and recover much more quickly. As the world heats up, we’re likely to have more blackouts too, so we need to learn from them.

“Look at their response there in New York,” says radio commentator Joe Taruc in the Philippines. “If it happened here, it would be nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Blackouts are a part of our daily life. I can’t understand why there is such panic in America,” says Turkish vendor Unal Karatas.
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It’s now thought that last week’s blackout started in Ohio, but the real question is, why did it spread so far and wide? In 2002, the British company National Grid merged with Niagara Mohawk to create “NiMo,” the 9th largest utility in the U.S., serving 3.3 million people in the New England/New York area. Is this the grid that failed? Author Greg Palast wrote, “?After government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk?with fines and penalties?the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it ‘deregulation’?And that’s why, if you’re in the Northeast, you’re reading this by candlelight tonight.”
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The great blackout of 2003 should not have been possible, and power officials did not believe it could happen before it did. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Radio One stated that the problem began with a disruption at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, while President Bush speculated that the cause might have been a lightning strike at a power plant in New York. Power officials are saying that the blackout began somewhere in the midwest, probably Ohio. We’ve discovered that a U.S. soldier was arrested a year ago when we was caught trying to plant an explosive at a nuclear power plant in Florida, an action that would likely have led to a similar collapse in another part of the power grid.
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New York could be the next American city to experience electricity blackouts, as the power crisis spreads East from California. Power managers in Boston and other New England cities said they could keep the power running through the summer unless an especially hot summer caused customers to use more air conditioning that usual.
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