Northeast blackout of 2003
A cascading outage that cut power to fifty million people in the United States and Canada, triggered by untrimmed trees and a silent software alarm.
A cascading failure starts with a local incident the grid should absorb, then spreads because each line that trips shifts its load to its neighbors, until whole regions separate. In August 2003, Ohio lines sagged into untrimmed trees, and a bug in the operator's alarm software left it without any alert for more than an hour, long enough for the situation to become unrecoverable. The official report found that the cause was neither an extraordinary load nor an attack but a combination of ordinary maintenance and monitoring lapses. For insurance, the event raised the question of business interruption without physical damage at the insured's premises, which policies cover only under utility service interruption, if it was purchased. It also led Congress to make grid reliability standards, until then voluntary, mandatory in 2005.
On August 14, 2003, starting at 4:10 p.m., the blackout hit eight US states and Ontario, 61,800 megawatts of load and about fifty million people, some for nearly four days; the US Department of Energy put its economic cost at about 6 billion dollars.
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