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To: UnBelievable who wrote (256016)	8/15/2003 2:25:57 AM
From: UnBelievable	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Canada says U.S. nuclear plant caused outage MONTREAL, Aug 14 (Reuters) - A severe outage at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant seemed to be the cause of the massive power blackout that hit large areas of North America on Thursday, the office of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said. But there were still conflicting reports on the cause. Earlier, the Prime Minister's Office said that officials on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border maintained that a fire or lightning had hit a power plant near Niagara Falls in New York state and started a cascading blackout over an area of 9,300 square kilometres (3,600 square miles) in the U.S. Northeast and Ontario. "It was caused by a power outage at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania," said Thoren Hudyma, a senior spokeswoman for the Prime Minister's Office in Ottawa. But U.S. grid operators dismissed the comment, saying Pennsylvania's nuclear plants had been operating smoothly and that the blame lies elsewhere. "The only plant that was lost in our region was Oyster Creek in New Jersey and it tripped as a normal protective measure when the northern New Jersey area tripped," Phillip Harris, president and chief executive of PJM Interconnection, the Mid-Atlantic power grid operator, told reporters. Canadian Defence Minister John McCallum said on Thursday night the U.S. military had advised him the outage at the nuclear plant did not involve an act of terrorism or sabotage. The Defence minister offered scant information, saying he had few details. Hudyma said the main Ontario power utility, Hydro One, was doing all it could to "decouple" itself from the U.S. power grid, to which it is interconnected. The Prime Minister's Office said it did not have an estimate on the expected length of the blackout. The prime minister was informed immediately of the power outage. "The prime minister would like to ensure Canadians that the government is working closely with its Ontario and U.S. counterparts to restore power," his office said in a statement read to Reuters. The prime minister said he was confident that crews from Hydro One, Ontario's electricity giant, would be able to restore service "as soon as possible." (Additional reporting by Amran Abocar in Toronto, Chris Reese in New York)