Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Although government and energy-industry officials
have continued to state that Thursday's massive power blackout was not an
act of terrorism, they are unable to rule out the possibility that a
computer hacker plunged 50 million people into darkness, a source told Fox
News Monday.
There were also reports that Al Qaeda had claimed
responsibility for the outage, although U.S. officials said Monday that
those claims should be taken with "a giant grain of salt."
A source in the midst of the investigation into the
blackout told Fox News there were signs the power grid was becoming
unstable as early as Thursday morning.
The final power outage took place at 4:11 p.m. EDT,
cascading across lower Michigan, northern Ohio, southern Ontario, most of
New York and New Jersey and parts of New England and Pennsylvania in just
9 seconds.
Several 345-kilowatt transmission lines were dropping
out of service, for reasons that still are unclear, in the hours leading
up to the blackout. A knowledgeable source told Fox News that turning off
such a heavy-duty line would be "like shutting down I-95 on the East
Coast."
Anatomy of a Power Failure
Around 2 p.m. EDT, a 680-kilowatt line at a coal plant
in Eastlake, Ohio, went out of service.
At 3:06, a 345-kilowatt line at FirstEnergy
Corp. (search) in Ohio shut down, but the alarm system didn't
notify technicians.
At 3:32, pressure from the first downed power line
caused another 345-kilowatt line to apparently fail.
At 3:41, two more lines of the same wattage shut down
within five minutes of each other.
At 4:10, two more 345-kilowatt lines in Michigan shut
down, knocking a coal-fired plant offline.
And at 4:11, a coal-fired plant and a nuclear plant in
Ohio shut down, sparking the lightning-quick process that finally turned
out the lights on the rest of the eastern Great Lakes and the New York
metropolitan area.
By the time the blackout spread outside Ohio and
Michigan, wildly fluctuating voltages were overwhelming systems left and
right.
Investigators have been
increasingly focusing on FirstEnergy, the nation's fourth-largest
investor-owned utility. The Akron-based company has 16 power plants, an
annual revenue of more than $12 billion and a service area that stretches
from Ohio to New Jersey.
FirstEnergy started noticing unusual voltage
fluctuations in the Midwest power grid more than three hours before its
transmission lines failed. The company said three of its transmission
lines in the Cleveland area and the fourth it co-owns failed an hour
before the blackout.
The Midwest Independent System Operator
(search) is also looking at four
lines that went down, while the NERC, the utility oversight group, says
three lines failed in northern Ohio.
But FirstEnergy said these failures alone couldn't have
triggered such a huge outage.
Evidence of that, FirstEnergy said, is that its
customers never lost power during earlier failures. Instead, last week's
meltdown was indicative, the company said, of a series of breakdowns in
the electric grid nationwide.
In the entire history of FirstEnergy, FirstEnergy
spokesman Todd Schneider said there hasn't been an outage of any system
due to hackers, and that that the weather in northeastern Ohio did more
damage.
When asked if the random outages could have been the
work of a computer hacker, a source told Fox News: "I'd be lying to you if
I told you it was not possible." He added that a hack attack was something
he had "been worried about."
Schneider vowed his company would leave no stone
unturned in its investigation. He admitted a computer hack was a
possibility, but not the leading theory.
The main question is why multiple safeguarding systems
failed in their main task to "isolate the failure to one neighborhood,"
something the mid-Atlantic and New England grids were successful in
doing.
Allen Schreiber, chairman of the Ohio
Public Utilities Commission (search), told Fox News that the
fluctuations were the result of tree contact with the lines in two of the
cases, but he stressed that the trees were at heights that meet utility
standards. Plus, tree contact wouldn't cause such a catastrophic
meltdown.
"I think that when a power line touches a tree, which
it does all the time, those power lines go out … every day," Schreiber
said. "There's enough back up in the system, enough redundancy, that it
should have made no difference at all."
The North American Electric Reliability
Council (search), an industry monitoring group, recently passed
mandatory cybersecurity regulations for all utilities, but they had not
been implemented.
FBI officials said there was no reason to believe that
the blackout was the result of a terrorist act, sabotage, hacker, or
anything along those lines. While it was "monitoring the situation," it
had not launched an investigation.
Possible Al Qaeda Claim
On Monday, the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat ran a
story saying a communiqué attributed to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility
for the blackout, saying that "the brigades of Abu Fahes Al Masri" had hit
two main power plants supplying the eastern region of the United States
and major U.S. and Canadian industrial cities.
The communiqué, reportedly posted on the Web site of
the International Islamic Media Center (search) and translated by the Middle East
Media Research Institute (search), assured that the operation "was carried out on
the orders of Usama bin Laden to hit the pillars of the U.S. economy," as
"a realization of bin Laden's promise to offer the Iraqi people a
present."
The communiqué also said: "Let the criminal Bush and
his gang know that the punishment is the result of the action … the
Americans lived a black day they will never forget.
"They lived a day of terror and fear ... a state of
chaos and confusion where looting and pillaging rampaged the cities, just
like the capital of the caliphate Baghdad, and Afghanistan and Palestine
were. Let the American people take a sip from the same glass."
The statement outlined certain conditions Al Qaeda
purportedly wanted met, including the release of all detainees held by the
U.S. and for non-Muslim powers to leave the "land of the Muslims,
including Jerusalem and Kashmir."
It noted that the event shut down nine nuclear reactors
in New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan and brought public
transportation and banking transactions to a halt.
"We tell the people of Afghanistan and Kashmir that the
gift of Sheikh Usama bin Laden is on its way to the White House."
High-ranking U.S. officials basically laughed at the
idea Al Qaeda could be behind the blackout.
"I would take that one with a huge grain of salt," one
official told Fox News.
The source added that there had been no indication,
domestically or internationally, that Al Qaeda or anyone else
intentionally triggered the power-grid collapse.
"It's probably a good PR stunt to put the idea out
there that [Al Qaeda] could do that," terrorism expert Harvey Kushner told
Fox News. "Certainly they're interested in having this type of capability,
but they prefer, most certainly, a low-tech type of truck bombs, flying
planes into buildings. They don't have this type of sophistication."
"Quite frankly," Kushner added, "I wouldn't lose any
sleep from the possibility they could take down power grids and things
like that."
Fox News' Bret Baier, Jeff Goldblatt, Ian McCaleb,
Brian Wilson, Liza Porteus and Anna Stolley contributed to this
report. | 
