FirstEnergy tries to get beyond the Great Blackout of

FirstEnergy tries to get beyond the Great Blackout of '03

Stephanie Waite, Times Business Editor

04/11/2004

At 3 p.m. Aug. 14, 2003, the power grid for the Northeastern United States was operating reliably and smoothly. By 4 p.m., things had gone badly wrong.

It had been a typical, 84-degree summer day. Air conditioners were humming, but not blasting, putting a normal burden on the grid.

Yet somehow, the nation's worst blackout happened that day, leaving 50 million people without power.

How did things go so wrong, so quickly?

No one big event triggered the blackout, according to a report by the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force. Rather, the massive outage was sparked by a combination of problems in the northeastern Ohio area served by FirstEnergy Corp. and American Electric Power.

The report pointed to numerous shortcomings on FirstEnergy's part that contributed to the blackout, problems that ranged from failure to trim trees to failures to communicate.

Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy owns the Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant and the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station, all in Shippingport. It also owns Penn Power Co., the electric utility serving most of northern Beaver County.

FirstEnergy spokeswoman Kristen Baird said the company was pleased to see that the task force's list of 46 recommendations for avoiding future blackouts were related to the power industry as a whole, and not FirstEnergy in particular.

"Certainly, there were some events that occurred on our system that day," Baird said. "But the grid was being used in ways for which it simply wasn't designed."

FirstEnergy takes exception to a number of the report's conclusions, Baird said. For example, it doesn't agree that it could have alleviated the blackout by "shedding load," or shutting off power to its own customers to keep the flow moving.

"We're not going to challenge every conclusion in the report," she said. "From here on, we're going to be forward-thinking."

The FirstEnergy failings cited by the task force include:

* The company did not tell anyone four capacitors, used for voltage support, were out of service.

* The company operated its system in the Cleveland-Akron area using a minimum voltage level that was far less stringent than neighboring systems, and inadequate for secure operations.

* Operators were not adequately trained or prepared to recognize and deal with emergencies.

* First Energy's control room operators were not aware that an alarm signaling problems became inoperable at 3:14 p.m., nor did they know their computer systems were not operating properly - even though the company's information technology staff knew of the problems and was working to solve them.

Throughout the afternoon of Aug. 14 there were many clues that FirstEnergy had lost its alarm function and that problems were cropping up in its transmission system, the report stated.

"However, FirstEnergy did not fully piece these clues together until after it had already lost critical elements of its transmission system, and only minutes before subsequent trips triggered the cascade phase of the blackout."

Baird of FirstEnergy said the communication problems stemmed directly from problems with the computer monitoring system. The company had begun installing a new system prior to the outage and expects it to be in operation by June.

Operators have always been trained to deal with emergencies, and FirstEnergy operators are trained above and beyond current certification requirements, she said.

FirstEnergy also has begun an enhanced vegetation management program in which workers actually patrol on foot along its 15,000-mile transmission corridor and cut down trees rather than simply prune them.

Stephanie Waite can be reached online at swaite@timesonline.com.