- NEW YORK (Reuters) - A lightning
strike caused massive power outages in New York and other cities across
the northeastern United States and Canada on Thursday, trapping thousands
in crowded subways and forcing millions of evacuated office workers onto
the streets.
-
- Amid initial fears that New York could once more be the
target of a terror attack, officials said a power grid failure caused by
lightning was the cause of outages that spread as far as Detroit, Cleveland,
Toronto and Ottawa.
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- "Initial reports indicate that this is a power system
failure not related to terrorism," said Homeland Security spokesman
Brian Roehrkasse.
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- "We have no indication that there is any terrorism
involved," said Bryan Lee, a spokesman for the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission in Washington.
-
- First investigations of the outage pointed to a failure
somewhere on the high voltage transmission lines connecting the United
States and Canada, power grid operators said.
-
- The Canadian prime minister's office said lightning at
a power plant at Niagara, New York state, had caused the blackout.
-
- In Canada, as many as 10 million people were affected
by the cuts, which brought most of southern Ontario to a halt, officials
said.
-
- Air traffic into New York's three major airports was
affected, and thousands of office workers crowded onto the streets in heat
of more than 90 F (33 C), facing a long walk home as buses and trains came
to a halt and the streets became gridlocked as traffic signals failed to
function.
-
- Thousands more were trapped underground in the dark when
rush hour subway trains stopped in their tunnels after the power went out
shortly after 4 p.m. EDT.
-
- Cellular phone services were disrupted as anxious New
Yorkers clogged the network with calls.
-
- "Right now the power outage is affecting all of
our operations, We have no buses, no trains, no subways running. The airports
have their perimeters secured ...," a spokesman for the New York Port
Authority said.
-
- Nine nuclear reactors in four U.S. states were shut down
following the outage, officials said.
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- POWER STARTS TO RESUME
-
- New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, later told a news
conference that power was starting to be restored. He appealed to people
to turn off electrical appliances to ease the load on the grid.
-
- "Power is starting to come back from the various
facilities," Bloomberg said.
-
- "And with a lot of luck, later on this evening we
will look back on this and say, "Where were you when the lights went
out?" but nobody will have gotten hurt."
-
- He added: "I would expect everything to be back
to business tomorrow."
-
- Late trading on U.S. financial markets was hit by the
outages, with dealing rooms shut down across the region.
-
- In New York, Citibank and J.P Morgan Chase and Co said
their automatic teller machine networks had been shut down in areas affected
by the blackout.
-
- The outage struck nerves among New Yorkers, whose memories
of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, still run strong, and people could be
seen running through the streets of the city's downtown financial district.
-
- "Scared," said Jeffrey Snop, of Queens, at
the Times Square subway station. "It reminded me of 9/11 and stuff
like that."
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- "Everybody just flipped out," said nurse Mary
Horan, stranded, with hordes of others, outside Grand Central Station.
"Suddenly you start thinking about 9/11."
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- Jessica Nottes said she was on top of the Empire State
Building when the power went out.
-
- "We had to walk down 86 flights of stairs,"
she said. "I kept thinking about the Twin Towers and how I would get
down. but everybody was calm."
-
- Officials said workers should go home if they could or
try to stay with friends if they lived too far out of the city.
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- TORONTO HIT
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- In Toronto, Canada's largest city, the transit system
ground to a halt and thousands were stranded as temperatures hit 86 F (30
C) and transit authorities shut the doors into
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- subway stations to prevent overcrowding.
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- "There's no power but they're safe," said a
transit official.
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- Both the Toronto Stock Exchange, the country's main bourse,
and Pearson International Airport were operating on back-up power supplies.
-
- Power was still on in Montreal, Quebec City and most
of Quebec. A spokesman for Montreal's Dorval airport said all flights to
blackout cities have been canceled, including Toronto.
-
- In Detroit, headquarters to the largest U.S. automakers,
many workers decided to go home after the lights went out, creating traffic
gridlock in the city. General Motors said several of its auto plants were
closed by the power outages.
-
- Similar outages have struck the U.S. Northeast in the
past.
-
- In 1965, the U.S. Northeast and Canada were plunged into
blackness at the peak of evening rush hour, leaving 30 million customers
in the dark for over 12 hours. In 1977, a substation serving New York City
and Long Island suddenly failed, blacking out millions.
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