Almost as quickly as the lights went out, life returned to normal Saturday in New York, with other major cities following closely behind as a broad swath of America recovered from the country’s most extensive blackout.
Investigators on Saturday identified the failure of three transmission lines in northern Ohio as the likely trigger for the blackout.
But they have not been able to determine why systems designed to contain the outage failed and the disruption spread so far.
New York’s subways, the linchpin of the city’s transportation system, returned to service early Saturday, the last major city service to be restored. Streets bustled and stores were filled with shoppers as most city residents went about their normal weekend routine.
Power also returned overnight Friday and early Saturday to Detroit and Cleveland, the last two major metropolitan areas to recover from the blackout that cut electricity Thursday to 50 million people across eight states and parts of Canada.
Still, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned Saturday that people in the Northeast and Midwest should be prepared for rolling blackouts until the region’s power grid was fully operational.
“We are now fairly certain this disturbance started in Ohio,” said Michehl Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, which was established after the 1965 Northeast blackout to foster power grid stability.
In a telephone news conference during which he did not take questions from reporters, Gent noted that the power transmission system was designed to isolate such problems and that power outages should have been confined to the Cleveland area.
“We are now trying to determine why the situation was not brought under control,” Gent said.
Later, in a statement suggesting human error was responsible for the spread of the blackout, Gent said in the future “system operators … will be extremely vigilant” when local transmission problems arise.
FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility that operates the transmission lines, did not comment on Gent’s statements. Earlier, the utility’s spokeswoman, Kristen Baird, told The Associated Press, “We are about to embark on an extensive review of what may have occurred. We have a long way to go.”
FirstEnergy officials also disclosed Saturday that a system designed to flash a red warning on computer monitors at the company’s control center was not operational when the lines began failing Thursday afternoon. It was not immediately clear whether that impeded efforts to isolate the local line disruptions.
“We cannot say with 100 percent certainty that this cannot happen again until we know what happened and what steps are being taken to prevent it again,” said New York Gov. George Pataki.
Power grid still shaky
Pataki cautioned Saturday that the state’s power grid was still in “a delicate balance.” All six of the state’s nuclear plants remained shut down, so New York must import more power than usual.
Although water systems in Cleveland and Detroit returned to service after power-related disruptions, residents of both cities were told to boil water used for drinking, cooking or cleaning because of fears of contamination.
Air traffic across the United States and Canada started to improve Saturday after two days of chaos, but passengers still faced long lines and delays. Travel industry experts warned that air traffic may not return to normal until Tuesday.
Many planes were left out of position when the power went out Thursday.
Recent cutbacks by financially pressed airlines have reduced the number of spare seats available for passengers when flights are cancelled, and fewer planes fly on weekends.
Even as airports in the rest of the country returned to normal power, Detroit’s Metro Airport was still experiencing sporadic power outages Saturday.
In New York, city residents lost $500 million to $750 million in personal income because of reduced economic activity caused by the blackout, according to preliminary estimates from city government.
Trash bags were piled high on some sidewalks as sanitation workers struggled to catch up with missed pickups and with spoiled food discarded by many grocers and restaurants.
The manager of one Midtown Manhattan supermarket estimated he had lost $5,000 in meat and dairy products. When power returned Friday, employees checked food for spoilage and frantically restocked shelves Saturday morning, said the manager.
Still, he said, business was up at least 15 percent from a normal Saturday as customers replaced food that spoiled in their refrigerators during the outage.
Delivery trucks unloaded groceries all over Manhattan to meet the demand.
“I wouldn’t buy fish today because I don’t trust merchants,” said Isaac Fuchs, 54, a trading company manager.
But, he added, “it’s not Liberia. There’s no shortages. You can get anything. Money makes things happen.”
At Citarella, a gourmet food shop on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side, the store was stocked with wild King salmon and Arctic char, buffalo burgers and Australian lamb, radicchio and baby spinach.
“It’s impressive,” said Eileen Krutchik, 63, who emerged laden with groceries. “They were out of blueberries. That’s about it.”
A usual weekend
On a hot but pleasant summer day, people lingered at sidewalk tables while Manhattan cafes served brunch. In-line skaters, joggers and bicyclists moved along paths beside the Hudson River.
The sidewalks were crowded in trendy SoHo. The checkout line at SoHo’s Apple computer store stretched almost to the back of the store.
“Business is pretty good,” said Jerome Santiago, a salesman who noted the store could not open Friday. “Without power, it’s pretty hard to sell computers.”
After two days of disruption, New Yorkers largely returned to the rituals of their lives.
The Chelsea Lanes bowling alley reopened just in time for Paul Johnson and a dozen of his friends to celebrate his birthday as planned.
“We didn’t know until this morning whether it would go on or not,” said his father, Eustace, a church music director. “I was up at 7:30, calling to make sure the bowling alley would be open.”
And so Paul turned 7 amid the clatter of bowling balls knocking down wooden pins, of excited shouts and arms victoriously thrust in the air. There were, after all, strikes and spares to go along with the pizza and cake.
