How to prevent future blackouts

Even more mysterious - and ominous - is why the failure wasn't contained locally and ended up cascading across the country, affecting power in eight states and Canada. Mechanisms exist to halt just such a spread. They worked in a few isolated areas. Boston, northern New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, for instance, were spared blackouts because their systems automatically disconnected from the failed grids. In Vermont, power plant operators noticed "rogue waves" coming from New York and split off their system on their own. But why didn't other computers and engineers respond to the cascading doom?

As authorities in both the US and Canada search for answers, the great blackout of 2003 was a sober reminder of just how critical electricity is to the functioning of modern life. When the lines went mute, ATM machines didn't work. Gas stations couldn't pump fuel. Computers flickered off. Grocery stores in the Midwest hawked perishable items - steaks and ice cream - on the streets rather than let them go to waste. Manufacturing plants shut down, as did subways and, frighteningly, elevators.

While the power has largely been restored in all the affected areas, officials are still tallying up the damage. By some estimates, the outage cost the nation $30 billion a day at its peak. The estimated tab in New York City alone is $800 million in lost economic activity and overtime paid to emergency crews.

Yet it isn't just the economic cost and inconvenience that worries many officials. If a system malfunction or human mistake can cause such a catastrophic failure, what about a group deliberately trying to sabotage the grid?

Congress is planning to hold hearings when it returns in September about the vulnerability of the electrical system to a terrorist attack. Authorities have fretted for years about how a few taps of a keyboard could lead to the shut down an entire grid, but the threat is now taking on fresh urgency.

Last January, Foreign Policy magazine ran an article that contained elements of eery foreshadowing. It imagined a terror attack on the nation's power grid at 4 a.m. during a sweltering night. Suddenly, "a national electric system already under immense strain is massively short-circuited, causing a cascade of power failures across the country," wrote Thomas Homer-Dixon. "The financial system and the national economy come to a screeching halt."

Still, for all the disruption and dire warnings, there was certainly something positive in the blackout: the response of the people. In cities from Cleveland to Detroit to New York, residents reacted to the outage with calm and compassion - particularly once terrorism was ruled out as a cause.

New Yorkers offered couches to commuters stranded in the city overnight. Stores gave away ice cream as an antidote to the heat. Emergency crews and ordinary citizens heroically rescued people trapped in elevators and subways. Virtually no looting was reported anywhere.

The esprit de corps was epitomized by Bart McHenry, a tourist from Orange County, Calif., caught in the blackout in New York. As traffic snarled Thursday night in the absence of stop lights, Mr. McHenry waded out into the middle of Seventh Avenue and did his best impersonation of a cop. He waved his arms and directed traffic in what looked like a spontaneous form of ballet. Drivers would high-five McHenry as they drove by. He would reply, sonorously: "New York loves you."

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