U.S., Canadian officials to meet on blackout probe
By Chris Baltimore
WASHINGTON - U.S. and Canadian officials will meet in Detroit on Wednesday to take the first step toward answering a burning question for the 50 million people plunged into darkness in last week's massive blackout: What happened?
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham will meet with Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal to agree on a way to sort through the massive amount of technical grid data required to answer the question.
"Our first, principal goal will be to determine what went wrong," Abraham told reporters on Tuesday.
On the U.S. side, the Energy Department will head the investigation, with support from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC). The council is an industry group created to prevent a repeat of massive outages which hit the East Coast in 1965.
Abraham said "hundreds" of agency investigators are already in the field. He refused to indicate any timeline for announcing results of the investigation, while FERC Commissioner William Massey said the group could release an interim report in mid-September.
So far, government officials have declined to speculate on the cause of the blackout. An initial NERC assessment released over the weekend focused on four power lines near Cleveland, Ohio, but industry officials say multiple failures were likely involved.
Two U.S. congressional committees are also investigating the blackout. The House (of Representatives) Energy and Commerce Committee will hold hearings on Sept. 3-4 with testimony planned from Abraham, FERC Chairman Pat Wood, New York Gov. George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The House Select Committee on Homeland Security will examine the grid's vulnerability to a terror attack.
Congress is in the middle of considering the first major rewrite of energy policy in a decade, which include provisions to require utilities to make their systems more reliable.
Lawmakers will start work on a final version of the energy plan within 20 days, President George W. Bush told reporters in Crawford, Texas, after talking by telephone with the chairmen of the House and Senate committees in charge of the bill. |
