When it began getting dark I was seriously getting curious about what was really going on and then I remembered that tucked in the basement was a battery powered radio. I think I tuned in four or five stations over the next couple of hours and was treated to this speculation and that speculation, but no real answers accept that the blackout was wide spread.

When the power finally came back on I of course turned on the TV and watched my local news, the CBC news, and CNN and once again got way too much speculation as to what caused the blackout and where it originated from. That was until I heard New York Governor George Pataki blaming the power outage on Canada. This is what he said:

“the New York independent systems operator says they are virtually certain it had nothing to do in New York state. And they believe it occurred west of Ontario, cascaded from there into Ontario, Canada, and through the northeast.”

Really?

By this time I had already heard some facts about the blackout and data had proved the origin was somewhere in the US.

In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation’s failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, and that strained high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting), which later went out of service when they came in contact with “overgrown trees”. The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.

The whole process of discovering what happened was great fun to follow, but for one thing that still burns me today, Governor George Pataki publicly blaming Canada for the blackout with no real data to back that up. It couldn’t be the US, it had to be Canada right? I couldn’t believe what I heard from his mouth. Let’s blame Canada because it couldn’t be us.

Of course, in the end the outage was born in the USA.

Canada isn’t a scapegoat for Pataki and neither is anyone else. Politicians need to get their facts straight before they open their mouths.

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