February 22, 1996 TO: Power Globe Community FROM: Bruce Wollenberg RE: November 9, 1995 Blackout in Northeastern US and Canada Here are all the responses I received via email. One can summarize them as follows: 1) Many of us attribute our entire career to the blackout. 2) It was the personal aspect of those who went through it that mattered most 3) Blackouts are still affecting the world’s power systems 4) Some people still blame me. Thanks also to Here is the original email, and the responses follow ------------------------------------------------------------- November 9, 1995 30th ANNIVERSARY Those of you who were around on Tuesday, November 9, 1965 should remember the Northeast Blackout which occurred on that date in the early evening. The power was out in parts of the northeastern United States for up to 24 hours. Electric utilities were for the most part unprepared for such an event and not able to cope with the demands for restart power, or the need for remote control of substations and other facilities that was required. I was a graduate student at the time living in upstate New York and have since then directly experienced several other major blackouts (PJM in 1967, the Pacific coast in 1984, and Hydro Quebec in the late 1980’s). Contrary to popular rumor I was in no way responsible for any of them. The Northeast blackout was by far the largest in geographical extent, MW load lost and number of people affected. It started the era of computerized energy management systems, on line security analysis, state estimation, wide use of SCADA systems, etc. If you have been visiting or living in the service territory of a power system that has undergone a large blackout - please send me an email with any remembrances you have of it and any technical information you may know about measures now in place to prevent such from happening again. If you can relate the cause of the blackout that would be extremely useful as well. Also, be sure to give the date and some idea of the geographic extent. If you are employed by an electric company or government agency, what measures have been taken to prevent widespread failures at your location? I shall attempt to assemble any responses and share them with all of the Power-Globe community. Bruce Wollenberg University of Minnesota Chair Power System Engineering Committee, PES, IEEE Anjan Bose, Washington State University My first job (trans planning engineer at Con Ed), in fact the whole group, was created as a result of that blackout and so I owe my whole career to it. You asked about experiencing blackouts which got me thinking as to what is a blackout. I have lived in places, and this is true of many parts of the second and third worlds, where there is a chronic shortage of generation and often people are without power. I think, we in the west, where systems are interconnected and there is always a reserve margin, consider a blackout to be something caused by a contingency. Also you said the northeast blackout was geographically the largest. That also is a matter of definition because we have not had a blanket blackout like that since. The 1984 pacific coast incident was probably spread out further as it affected all of WSCC but not all of it blacked out. The cause was also geographically spread as the fault was in Oregon and the pilot wire trip that cuts the donut in half (intentionally) was in Arizona (Four Corners). Of course, there were lots of localized tripping after that in different parts of the WSCC area. Its very true that the impetus for the EMS advanced applications came from these blackouts. From the applications that you mentioned I get the feeling that people have forgotten that some of the Northeast companies like Con Ed and Phila Electric put in distribution factors based on-line contingency analysis around 1970, BEFORE AEP put in the first state estimator. Given the number of control centers that have running advanced applications twenty five years later, I wonder if we should have made sure that every body had these simple contingency analysis programs. Problem is again, if things run smoothly one cannot make careers on them. adly.girgis@ces.clemson.edu I will be giving a presenting to undergraduate students about the graduate studies in power systems.A good starting point for protection and on-line disturbance identification research would be the 1965 black out. holen@elkraft.unit.no “Unfortunately”, I can’t report about a similar anniversary happening in Norway, but I do remember a widespread blackout in Sweden, December 27th, 1983. It was a voltage instability case.Lots of reports have been written about it. You could ask Goran Andersson at Royal Institute of Technology to provide more information, or give you some other names who can provide the information. Bill Kersting I asked my graduate class today what happened 30 years ago today. Not only did they not know the answer, most of them had never even heard of the blackout. 1965 was the start of the third year of my teaching at New Mexico State. I had been hired to put some life in the dead power program. I was not making much headway until the blackout. That got everyone’s attention, and things really picked up for me. In 1977 I was awarded the “Westhafer Award” for excellence in teaching. I had to make a speech at the award ceremony and in that speech I gave credit to the blackout for the turn around in my teaching career. El Paso Electric published my speech in their company publication that year. For your information, I am going to make copies of my speech and mail them to you. I find it kinda interesting to go back and re-read it again. I said in 1977 and I will say it again, the blackout was the greatest thing that every happened to the power industry. What we need today is another really big one. That is the only way we are going to get the attention of the bean counters who are running the industry today. Carl H. Benker ComEd, Chicago I work for a utility and we do two things to prevent widespread blackouts in our service territory. First, we do quite a few “extreme disturbance” studies to evaluate the effect of substantial occurrences on our system (plane crashing and taking out an entire right-of-way, double unit trip at our critical system locations, complete substation fault/outage, etc.). Whenever we find a problem situation, we reinforce our system (specialized trip schemes, dispatcher operating guides, etc.) to handle it. The other way that we prevent widespread blackouts is with undervoltage load shedding trip schemes. If the voltage in an area drops below some predetermined threshold (due to high load, lack of var support, etc.) certain load is dropped. Chris Pottle Cornell University I remember the Great NE Blackout well - all was in readiness in our family for the arrival of our 2nd child on Nov. 10 (by appointment - the ptocin “drip”). The lights went out about 5:30PM in Ithaca - we got out our camping equipment, cooked dinner on a Coleman stove and lit the place with a Coleman lantern. It was over in Ithaca by 11PM, so our daughter arrived on schedule the next day. Daniel Kirschen UMIST The following quote got Prof Kirschen’s attention. “I was a graduate student at the time living in upstate New York and have since then directly experienced several other major blackouts (PJM in 1967, the Pacific coast in 1984, and Hydro Quebec in the late 1980’s). Contrary to popular rumor I was in no way responsible for any of them.” You made my day with this acknowledgment. Thanks. Frank Galiana McGill University, Montreal Of course, I was much too young to remember the Big One of ‘67. I was doing my Masters at MIT at the time with Fred Schweppe but he was just getting into power. This event may have been the clincher in convincing Fred to devote his great intellect to our field. But I do remember the last major failure in Quebec in 1988 or 89 whose origins were attributed to a solar storm. The currents induced by the changing magnetic fields infiltrated a number of Static Var Compensators through earth causing them to saturate and malfunction. These SVC’s were needed to stabilize the long 735 kV lines which then went unstable. George Gross University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!THE KEY POINT IS THAT BASICALLY VERY FEW OF US IN ACADEMIA WOULD STILL BE AROUND WERE IT NOT FOR NOV. 9.,1965. I BELIEVE GIVEN NY TIMES GOOD INVESTIGATION THAT THE SAME WOULD BE SAID BY THE KIDS BORN 9 MONTHS LATER --PURELY THE OUTCOME OF THE BLACKOUT. Gerry Heydt Purdue I was a graduate student in November 1965 -- going to school at Purdue University in West LaFayette, Indiana. A group of us were going to dinner that night on November 9 --- I can remember it was a Tuesday because the Hill House Restaurant south of town on highway 231 always had a special deal on tuesdays -- all the chicken you can eat -- and graduate students were always hungry. The drive to the Hill House was fairly long, and all of us transplanted New Yorkers were listening to WABC from New York on the car radio. In the evening, that station could be heard plainly in Indiana even though we are about 800 miles west of New York City. The station went off the air, then came on and then went off -- and the announcer mentioned that there was some problem. Finally we heard that the building power at WABC went off but they were running on auxiliary power. Then they said that the whole city was out. One of the fellows in the car was from Buffalo New York, and we tried to get the AM radio station from Buffalo. But that was out too, and so was WBZ in Boston. The first thing that went through my mind was that there was an enemy attack. I tried to call my parents from the Hill House, but the lines were all busy. We had our chicken, and later that night I heard that it was a widespread power blackout. The power here in Indiana never did go out. glenn_s kcc.state It’s nice that you’re around to keep us in the dark. Let’s all show some gratitude for reliability, and celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Northeast Blackout of ‘65 with a moment of silence and darkness. Harold Kirkham I have wondered who was responsible, Bruce. Sure you are not responsible? Seriously, though, would the blackout in the early morning of January 19, 1994 be of interest to you? This was caused by the Northridge earthquake. There was loss of load and loss of transmission capability; there were blackouts or brownouts as far away as Alberta, so I hear. I think this has been described someplace, from the power engineering point of view. Good luck with the data gathering! Hugh Rudnick, Chile looking forward to your report on large blackouts. We used to have many in the times of terrorist action in the country. John A. Demcko, P.E. Sr. Consulting Engineer Arizona Public Service Company I just got back from chairing the 1995 Fault & Disturbance Analysis/Precise Measurements in Power Systems Conference in Washington, DC. Great idea to summarize the info relating to the blackout. Here is my story: At the time, I was a junior in high school in upstate New York (Richfield Springs, NY - near Cooperstown). The town is on the Northern extremity of the NYSE&G territory, near Niagrara Mohawk service territory. It was and is a small farming community of approx 1500 residents. I had just gotten home from my afternoon paper route and sat down to supper with my mother, father and 5 year old brother. I noticed that the lights began to dim, but not flicker. I suspected a local problem with my parents rather antiquated fuse box and ran to get my trusty Lafayette Radio VOM. I plugged the test leads into the wall and saw 90 vrms on my meter and dropping. No info on frequency since my Heathkit scope was of course, line powered and already useless. I noticed that neighbors lights were very dim as were the street lights. I did have a very early Westinghouse 7 transistor battery powered radio (cost me $35 of paper route $) and it was soon obvious that the blackout was widespread and massive. Not many radio stations had backup power so most of the AM radio dial was conspicuously blank of local stations. I was able to rig some emergency power from my parents 65 Chevy Belaire to power my amateur radio station (WB2SHE then, now I’m KD7JR) and get on 75 meter single sideband and talk to a few other stations in the Northeast with emergency power. It again confirmed the enormity of the blackout. Voltage got down to approximately 40 volts before local circuits opened according to the VOM I left plugged into the wall outlet. Lights went out at around half voltage we were burning candles. My mom wanted me to get off the air fearing we were under some sort of attack. I did but continued to monitor the 75 meter amateur band. Our lights came on about four hours later. I think we got back on line due to islanded operation of a relative small system with some nearby NYSE&G hydro generation, but I don’t know that for certain since my knowledge of power systems was very limited at that time. The impact on me was significant. I was fascinated with how a relatively benign event could mushroom into such an enormous problem. I was an math & science major in high school and was considering some sort of engineering career. The blackout gave me a focal point and I was accepted at Clarkson University the fall of 1967. Got my BSEE in 71 and MSEE in 72 and have been marveling that the whole interconnected system of generation, transmission and distribution works as well as it does ever since. The blackout quite literally thrust me into a career in power engineering. Best Regards, John Kevin Hurst Well, actually I wasn’t born until the 17th of Nov in ‘65, so I don’t have any memories to relate. I was actually trying to ask my Dad if the outage affected “us”, in Newport, RI, where I was born. Since I became a power engineer (I’m a PhD student in power electronics and motors) it seems an appropriate introduction to the “real world”. Mariesa L. Crow University of Missouri-Rolla I have a blackout story, but I don’t know if it qualifies or not. When I was a graduate student in Champaign, Illinois, we had a severe ice storm which knocked out a lot of the distribution lines in central Illinois (Illinois Power and CIPS areas). I’d estimate that the affected area was several hundred square miles. Parts of Champaign (including our house) were without power for 6 days. This occurred in February of 1990. Line crews worked 24 hour shifts for about 10 days. I do not know much of the technical nature of the blackout other than I think untrimmed trees contributed to a significant portion of the loss of lines. Mark J. Damborg College of Engineering, FH-10 University of Washington Seattle Thank you for your effort in assembling this information. It is an important part of our heritage. Mark Enns Electrocon International, Inc. Ah ha! The Joe Btspflk of blackouts! (I may not have the spelling just right, but I mean the old Li’l Abner character. Wherever he was, lightning would strike, safes fall out of office windows, etc.). Now /I/ on the other hand was never in the territory for any of these. Of course, we’ve all been living off that blackout for 30 years :-). Roy Hoffman I also got your message last Nov about the 30th Anniversary of the NE Blackout. At CAE I from time to time give an introduction to new employees called SCADA/EMS/DMS systems: What do our customers do with them? As part of the introduction I recount my personal experience of being out on a dinner date with my fiancee on that night and the power went off. I tell them that night was significant because my date of that night is now my wife, and because of that event (in part at least) we have jobs in the SCADA/EMS business as well! Ramesh Rayudu Thank you for sharing the information about the 30th anniversary of NY blackout. I am doing a PhD sponsored by a Transmission Company which owns New Zealand’s power network. The PhD is about Alarm Processing and Fault Diagnosis of Power Transmission Networks. Satish Ranade In the last month we’ve had 4 blackouts 1 of them covered all new mexico and east texas. I will check with certain people and attempt to give you a short summary Thanks also to Dejan J. Sobajic, EPRI who sent a copy of an article from the Nov 19, 1965 LIFE magazene. The article was written by Theodore H. White and the lead title is “WHAT WENT WRONG? SOMETHING CALLED 345KV” other page titles are ““The unreasoning computers demand more power” and “Needed: More purpose, not just more electricity”.