| Abstract |
On August 14, 2003, large portions of the Midwest and Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected an area with an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts (MW) of electric load in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and the Canadian province of Ontario. The blackout began a few minutes after 4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (16:00 EDT), and power was not restored for 4 days in some parts of the United States. Parts of Ontario suffered rolling blackouts for more than a week before full power was restored. Estimates of total costs in the United States range between $4 billion and $10 billion (U.S. dollars). In Canada, gross domestic product was down 0.7% in August, there was a net loss of 18.9 million work hours, and manufacturing shipments in Ontario were down $2.3 billion (Canadian dollars). Although this Final Report presents some new information about the events and circumstances before the start of the blackout and additional detail concerning the cascade stage of the blackout, none of the comments received or additional analyses performed by the Task Force's investigators have changed the validity of the conclusions published in the Interim Report. This report, however, presents findings concerning additional violations of reliability requirements and institutional and performance deficiencies beyond those identified in the Interim Report. |
