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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Blackout hits northeast U.S., Canada

Aired August 14, 2003 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone in what will go down surely as one of the stranger days in a strange period of years here in New York City and across the East Coast of the United States.
Think about it for a second. In three minutes, just three minutes, 21 power plants went down across the east and millions of people, tens of millions of people saw darkness right then. Subways with thousands of people here in New York stopped running. Elevators with people trying to get out of high rises stopped until generators could go back on.

All of this in three minutes at a little past 4:00 Eastern time for reasons we still do not yet know. What has happened today in the United States, or at least in the eastern part of the United States has raised, as you just heard for those of you who were watching Larry tonight, has raised profound questions about the state of the electric grid in the United States.

But those are questions in large measure for tomorrow. Tonight's questions have to do with when will the power get on and how are millions of people across the east coping?

New York tonight largely is dark. We have a series of pictures we can show you, live pictures from New York. First, there are we are told by the mayor small pockets of the city, areas of the Bronx, areas of Queens where power has come back on.

Parts of Westchester, which is a very large county to the north, driving Westchester the length of Westchester north to south would take you about an hour to give you a sense of how large a county it is. You've got millions of people up there. They are slowly getting power.

That's in the New York area. I think we have a picture of the Empire State Building. You'll see a little bit of light in it, a little bit of light in it. On a normal night that would be a spectacular scene down in the lower part of Midtown in Manhattan on 34th Street, the great Empire State Building mostly dark tonight.

But this is not simply a New York story, of course, because millions of people have been affected as far north as Toronto and Ottawa in Canada where they continue to have power problems tonight.

People in Cleveland have had power problems since late this afternoon as well and as far west as Detroit and we have live pictures out of Detroit tonight to show you what that city looks like.

In most of these places most of the power is still out. In some of these places, parts of New Jersey for example, power never went out. In some parts of New Jersey we could see in Jersey City power has already come back on, at least in parts of Jersey City.

So, slowly but surely, to use the president's phrase about an hour and a half ago, slowly the grid or work-arounds the grid are kicking in and there is some concern that if power came on all at once all of those air-conditioners, computers and all the rest that were left on when the power went off at a little past 4:00 would cause a huge problem.

Slowly, the problems are being solved. Whether they're solved tonight, tomorrow, we don't yet know. We hope to find out in the next hour or so what the best estimates are.

Jeanne Meserve covers primarily national security questions or homeland security questions for us. It is not a stretch to say, I suspect, that when most of you heard about this for the first time the first thought that went into your mind was, was it a terrorist attack of some sort of another? I assume, Jeanne, that was your first question as well.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was and the answer was at first we just don't know but as the evening progressed the answer came back no, not terrorism. We believe this was caused by some kind of technical problem. What exactly that was we still don't know.

There have been a variety of reports, many of them shot down. At one point we heard it might have been a lightning strike on a power plant in Niagara Falls, New York. Authorities there strongly deny it, say the plant in Niagara Falls was up and operating, in fact was a rock of the system through this entire episode.

Then we heard perhaps it was a lightning strike or a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says not so. All of those plants were fine, no reports of any problems whatsoever. So, that investigation will continue.

According to one authority I spoke to in the electric industry it may be several days before they figure out precisely what it was that might have caused this problem but it was incredibly striking.

We have some graphics to show you. Genscape is a company which monitors the output of power plants for power traders and it has this on its Web site. Look at all those red marks.

Those are power plants that were operating between zero and 39 percent at about 4:15 this afternoon, look at them all. Most of those we can presume, given what happened, probably were operating at zero percent capability.

And then we have another thing to show you. This is a graphic again from the Genscape Web site. This shows you what happened at one power plant in Dunkirk, New York. Power production is going along at a relatively regular rate and then suddenly it falls off.

According to Genscape from its monitoring between 4:10 and 4:13 this afternoon 21 plants shut down. Nine nuclear power plants remain offline at this point in time. I'm advised that this is something totally normal. When the grid goes down there's no place for those plants to put their electricity and so they are shut down. They will be brought back online gradually as the grid comes up and begins functioning once again.

As for the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Ridge immediately set up his crisis action team. They began to interface with the electrical industry. I should say 85 percent of the electrical infrastructure in this country is in private hands so that's a very important link for them to establish.

Also, they set up their communications with the affected state and local officials. In addition, they began monitoring critical sectors, including transportation and border crossings. Most of the border crossings operated fairly regularly through this except for the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit. There were some delays of 20 to 30 minutes or so.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are very pleased at this point with how things went. The one problem they had, of course is not knowing what caused this. They still don't have the answer to that but they point to New York City, the pictures or orderly evacuations there and say this just proves that all this planning that we've been putting into disaster preparedness are paying off.

People knew how to do this. There was no panic. There was good communications. Of course, they're going to be continuing to examine their response and the local and state response and the industry response over the days to come to try and determine more about what they might improve.

Another thing they've been poised to do is respond to any requests from any states for emergency assistance. At this point in time remarkably enough, Aaron, there have been no requests at all that have come in to the Department of Homeland Security - back to you.

BROWN: The department has done a lot of mock drills over the last several months to see how they respond to various scenarios. This was not a mock drill. This was a real dry run of how homeland security, at least, as one agency in the government would handle a real crisis, not a terrorist crisis in this case. Is there a sense there, and I assume they'll say everything went pretty well, is there a sense there that things, systems did work?

MESERVE: There is within the department. This, I'm told, is probably the biggest event they've had to handle, real life event they've had to handle since the department was set up. They do feel that it went fairly well from their perspective.

I will tell you that I did talk to one person at the state level who felt that the communication could have been clearer. He felt that they were not getting enough information about what was going on.

But if what the Department of Homeland Security tells me is true that may be because they couldn't get information about what was going on. This was such a complex situation and they weren't getting the information they needed fast enough from the electrical industry.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you very much and I know you'll continue trying to figure out what went wrong and how people have responded to it and we'll check back with you.

I thought it was interesting to hear Jeanne report that the Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said this is an example of how systems work, how prepared the city of New York is.

I think it is fair to say anyone who was here on September 11, now almost two years ago, knows how New Yorkers handle a crisis and by and large this was an enormous crisis in the city, as you can image, a hot summer day, the end of the work day, and all of the reports that we've heard, all of the reports that we've heard have said New Yorkers handled this the way they handle so many other things, a sense of calm, a sense of decency.

A lot of people - there are people at the tunnels, at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels that go under the river over to New Jersey, people standing outside with signs saying I need a ride, give me a lift, trying to get home because none of the trains were running and the subways weren't running and the trains that go across the river weren't running.

And, people were stopping and picking them up, getting them home. Still tonight, thousands of people, tens of thousands of people we dare say are stuck in the city, people who would have taken either the trains north to Long Island and to Westchester, two major areas of New York, people stuck here, people who would have gone to New Jersey.

Busses are moving some of them but hotels, as you can imagine, are packed. Restaurants closed, shops closed, the city is calm. There are no reports of any of the kinds of things that you would worry about.

Anderson Cooper is on the upper east side of New York and he can give us a better sense of what things are like in that part of Manhattan tonight - Anderson, good evening.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron, and I can tell you all day long for the last four or five hours I've been walking the streets of New York and have seen just hundreds and hundreds of New Yorkers.

And, as you said, I mean their reactions are as varied as the citizens of the city. Some people react with anger and frustration, some with humor, but it is calm and, as you say, in particular where I am, 73rd Street and First Avenue, outside a bar called Session 73, this is a very unique New York reaction to the events of today.

This bar here has basically - as you can see, people have been here for several hours. The bar started selling beers here shortly after the blackout for $2. They're not up to $6 and the place is packed.

I don't know if you can see down here. They've actually put couches onto the street and everyone is just hanging out and there are candles and it's really sort of a big party as you can see, very festive. They've had a few I think some of them.

Come over here. Let me introduce you to someone. This is David. David, and this is your daughter Pilar (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pilar, right.

COOPER: How long have you been here at this bar?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, Pilar's been here about 5:30 and I came at about 7:30.

COOPER: I was talking to David before and he's had a very upper east side reaction to this blackout if I may say. A lot of people grab essential foods. David has grabbed what he felt was essential. What food have you rescued from your apartment?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, we grabbed a little (unintelligible) from the cupboard and brought it out here and we're having a great time.

COOPER: And just in case you think he's joking, he actually does have the (unintelligible) right here. It's actually quite tasty. So, it's a very unique New York reaction to this very unique day - Aaron, back to you.

BROWN: Well, for those of you who don't know the city, the upper east side is thought of as sort of a Tony (ph) part of town and so (unintelligible) fits in. They're no doubt having espressos on the upper west side of New York tonight if they can get the machines to work, which they probably can't.

The question in the city and through much of the East Coast still tonight is when will the power come back on? By and large that's just not known. We wish we could tell you that. We can't.

Maria Hinojosa has been down at Con Edison. Con Ed is the electrical supplier, the major utility here. We assume you can hear that siren in the background. We have heard very few sirens tonight but we sure hear that one. Maria Hinojosa is on the phone, I believe, at Con Ed - Maria.

OK, we'll try and get Maria back. Obviously, the situation at Con Ed here in New York in the city is a little chaotic. They, too, are trying to answer the question that we're trying to answer which is when will parts of Manhattan start to see power again?

John King has been working the story most of the afternoon from Washington and John joins us tonight from there, John good evening. JOHN KING, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, a fascinating day here in Washington as we watch the developments power on throughout the day here in Washington.

Of course, as you were just discussing with Jeanne Meserve, the initial question and the initial fear in Washington was is this a terrorist attack? As Jeanne recounted the government mobilized quickly to try to get the answer to that question.

Many more questions tonight but the president, who was in California, answered one of them emphatically when he spoke to reporters earlier in the eight o'clock hour, late in the eight o'clock hour here on the East Coast, the president speaking in California said five words I'm certain all Americans wanted to hear when he said: "This is not a terrorist attack."

The president saying the federal government was looking for answers as to how this happened today. He said the federal government would make any resources necessary available to the affected states. So far, we are told no requests of the federal government.

But, on the key issue that will come up tomorrow and the next day once the power is brought back up in these major cities, what happened here and is this country ill-prepared for such a thing? Does the electrical grid need to be modernized? The president said he thinks the answer is yes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does and I've said so all along but this will be a - this is going to be an interesting lesson for our country and we'll have to respond to it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: A lesson for the new Department of Homeland Security and other agencies post 9/11, preparedness planning that most here in Washington believe the government passed today.

But, Aaron, as this debate continues in the days, weeks, and certainly months ahead many will say if the president thinks the grid should be modernized he should break the electricity part of federal energy legislation out of the bill.

That bill has been held up throughout the Bush administration because of disputes over drilling for oil and gas in Alaska, for example, other disputes, partisan disputes in Congress. One lesson here in Washington might be focus on electricity. Deal with other controversies a bit later. We will see how that all plays out but much more pressing questions, of course, at the moment.

BROWN: John, let me throw a couple at you since you've been dealing with a lot of this, this afternoon and this evening, tonight. We talk about the power grid. Are we talking about something the federal government owns or the federal government regulates?

KING: Well, the federal government owns less of it and the federal government regulates less of it than five years ago or ten years ago because of the deregulation of the energy industry. So, the federal government owns very little of this.

The federal government stepped in after 9/11 mostly to focus on security measures are especially nuclear power plants but also the grid, are they vulnerable to nuclear attacks -- are they vulnerable to terrorist attacks, excuse me?

That was the focus after 9/11, much less focus from the federal perspective on the capacity of the grid and could it withstand something like this? California, of course, had the energy crisis that is a part of the root. You see Governor Gray Davis dealing with the problems right now.

So, in terms of capacity and the ability to handle it and the lack, as we saw today, of firewalls, if one plant goes down can you stop the cascading effect of other states? Those will be questions that come in and, as we have been discussing this today with former energy secretary Bill Richardson, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, many of them saying deregulation has gone too far.

The industry, of course, says that is not the case but it says it could use some help from the federal government in modernizing things. So, that will be a policy debate that will come out of all of this that we're seeing today.

BROWN: And, just quickly in looking at the energy bill, just to underscore something, most of the discussion, I'm not sure of every detail in the bill and

I suspect you're not sure of every detail in the bill either, but we have talked about the supply, how do we increase the amount of energy? We haven't talked very much about the mechanism that literally gets it from Point A through the system to your house and mine, fair?

KING: A very fair point and you can be certain I don't know every detail in this bill. The electricity debate goes back to the Clinton administration, the debate about modernizing the grid, whether the federal government should have more control, how much deregulation is too much deregulation if there is such a thing. It depends on who you talk to.

That has not been a focus of much public debate and we should admit in our business not the much focus of great media coverage because it's not terribly a sexy issue until you see something like this happen.

In Washington, the controversy has been over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, other energy issues that get caught up in a partisan debate. You can be certain, at least in the short term, there will be a great deal of focus on what is the federal role in making sure something like this cannot and does not happen again. BROWN: John, thank you very much, John King our Senior White House Correspondent and now energy expert in Washington tonight, thank you.

I imagine and I know it's true of me, I suspect it's true of most of you, we've all gone through power outages in our time whether it's a lightning strike, a bad thunderstorm, a this and a that but it probably never occurred to any of us, or at least not most of us, that one problem somewhere on the line somewhere could wipe out electricity to this huge corner, this most populated corner of the United States which is exactly what happened today.

Let's try again to get Maria Hinojosa who is at Con Edison, Consolidated Edison, the major electrical utility here in New York and in parts outside of New York as well - Maria.

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Hi, Aaron.

Well, we just had a report now from a spokesman here in front of Con Ed which I have to say, Aaron, it's one of the eeriest sites to be in front of the headquarters, the administrative headquarters of Con Ed and to see all of these officials walking around with their flashlights in the lobby and then holding a press conference in the dark.

But what they did say is they have begun what he called a careful process of restoring power. He did say that this is a mechanical process and that it's pretty much a slow and deliberate one. What they were able to confirm is they have been able to restore power in parts of the Bronx and Westchester but that is about it at this point.

They said that the command center upstairs is in touch with the control centers all across the city and as power becomes available to Con Edison then they determine where it can go. He said it's a technical process about where it can go.

It's not as if they're making a decision about what part of the city needs it the most but rather it's more of a question of what is able to technically download this electricity that they get in.

When we asked him whether or not when we start to see this power will it be full power or will it be more of a brownout he said we have to see about that and that there was no way for him to determine when power would be back entirely.

When I asked him very specifically about 6:00 a.m. would there be power restored by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning he said there is no way we can speculate as to whether or not that would happen.

Now interestingly, Aaron, we are just a block away from Union Square Park so as opposed to what Anderson was reporting on before with the bar and kind of an atmosphere of joining around this bar, in Union Square Park you're having more of a cultural expression. There are poets reciting poetry. You've got drummers who are drumming.

The police were out in small groups of about a half a dozen or so. When I asked them if everything was calm they said everything is calm. We're just here to make sure that everybody is having a good time but you're seeing people walking around the streets of New York City with flashlights, with candles, and yes there is at least down here very much a sentiment of calm and of people enjoying this and staying out.

When I saw some people out with their kids, carrying their kids in their little backpacks behind them, these are you know little toddlers, they said well it's too hot to stay inside so we're just going to walk around until they fall asleep and then go back home.

So, what we know from Con Ed is that there is no way that they can speculate as to when power will return but at least down here people are taking it in stride and handling it with a sense of calm - Aaron.

BROWN: (AUDIO GAP) how to get power back on through the neighborhoods of Cleveland. It's what's going on in Detroit. It's going on in Toronto. It's going on in big cities and small cities.

We heard reports that Albany, the capital of New York, has gotten much - a fair amount of its power back on but getting these systems back on is not a simple thing. You don't want it to come on too fast because it will overload, essentially blow a fuse and we're back to where we started.

So, they are trying to get it back on but it is a slow process and, as Maria reported, at least here in New York there is no guarantee that tomorrow morning people will awake, assuming they can sleep on this hot summer night, they will awake to power.

Our coverage continues after a short break. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: That's the most light you'll see in the city of New York tonight, at least most of the city of New York coming up on 10:30 Eastern time on a very warm and very memorable summer night across the east and across the country as the power is out.

Winn Schwartaw is with a company called Security Awareness. They do most cyber security and he joins us tonight. One of the things, Winn, that I wondered about when I first heard about this is was this the worm? We've talked about this worm that has been infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, large and small, can we say definitively it was not the worm?

WINN SCHWARTAW, SECURITY AWARENESS CO.: Nothing is 100 percent ever but I think that we have a darn good idea that the odds of it being involved are extraordinarily low. It certainly looks like a typical power failure or, not typical, but it's a power failure.

BROWN: Well, let me play with that for a second because to me it doesn't look like a typical power failure. A typical power failure would blow the power out in a small city or a county in the worst of circumstances but not the entire region. In what sense then is this typical?

SCHWARTAW: Well, I think that something has occurred in the last ten years. If we go back to the early '90s when the telecommunications had some problems, we had a cascade effect where one switch went bad and then subsequently a lot of the country went out.

We've seen the same thing with the critical infrastructure of transportation, with airlines. We see the same thing with the psychology of the financial markets. When something goes wrong there's a cascade effect.

And, in this case, we've seen the cascade effect within the power grid up in the Niagara-Mohawk region in the way that they're tied together and in they cyber world with the worm that you spoke of, same kind of thing. There are cascade effects that multiply as a result of us having so many things tied together and we haven't completely dealt with how to solve that yet.

BROWN: At the risk of asking the unanswerable why hasn't it happened before? Why is that we to my memory we've never seen anything of this scale affect the electric grid?

SCHWARTAW: Because there's more and more. Since the big power outage in New York in '77, there was some congressional changes in the way that the power grids had to work with each other, the way that power is distributed, the way that the load balancing is done.

And, in order to make things more efficient there was more integration of the various systems and, when you have more integration, unless you're planning on a regular basis for something to go wrong you tend to kind of assume that things are going to be OK and that's a false assumption that we've had for the last ten, 12 years.

BROWN: Is it reasonable that a bolt of lightning did this?

SCHWARTAW: I am not a power grid expert but if a bolt of lightning hit a critical node and there were not break points or the power equivalent of a firewall between various portions in the grid, theoretically yes. I think we're going to find out those answers over the next several days.

BROWN: And, is it preventable or is it a kind of lucky strike if a bolt of lightning or a small fire or whatever this turns out to be are we going to always be in some respect or another at risk of this happening either in the northeast or the southwest or anywhere else in the country?

SCHWARTAW: It's preventable in the future if we take certain steps to look at how to deal with disasters, how to deal with whether it's a cyber event or, in this case a power event, that when something goes wrong do we have the mechanisms in place to disconnect the area that is wrong that's causing the trouble from everything else so that we don't spread the problem? Can we isolate the problem? This is true in the world of networks. It's true with the worlds of worms and viruses and it's certainly going to be more and more true as we investigate how the power grids operate.

BROWN: Do you think it's possible this was a human error of some sort?

SCHWARTAW: I'm kind of glad you brought that up. A lot of the folks that I've spoken to today said, al Qaeda and terrorists and I said I just don't buy it. I do not believe that the bad guys came in from the outside and did it.

However, if I were in charge of this investigation, I certainly would want to take a look at some of the insiders that had access to some of the significant controls throughout the systems because one of the things that we worry about now is not so much the outsiders from the Internet getting in and doing damage but an insider who has malicious intent who has the access to do damage and that's something that I'd be, I'd want to look at a little bit more closely.

BROWN: Would it have to be someone who had malicious intent as opposed to someone who spilled a cup of coffee on control board somewhere?

SCHWARTAW: Again, I'm not an expert of how power plants operate. It could be an oops, it could be lightning, it could be a combination of them, and it could be malicious. But in this case, I just don't believe it was malicious, and I hope that I'm proven right. I hope that it's just a pure accident, and that we can recover from it, and learn how to handle these types of events better in the future.

BROWN: Winn, thanks for joining us.

Some interesting things to think about. We're all slowly, very slowly in some of our cases, coming to understand the complexity of the electric grid, the electrical system in the country, how interconnected it is. That is clearly a huge part of the story in the days ahead.

For tonight, though, I think the larger part of the story is how people in Cleveland and Detroit and Toronto and Ottawa and parts of Cape Cod and here, there, and everywhere across the Northeast are coping.

Wolf Blitzer has been on the streets of New York, down here in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. Has been talking to people, and he joins us now. Wolf, good evening.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, Aaron.

They are coping very well so far under bad circumstances, circumstances that presumably are going to get worse in the coming hours before electricity is restored here in Manhattan.

We are told electricity coming back slowly in other parts of New York City, in the Bronx and elsewhere.

We have some pictures we're going to show you of what was going on earlier in the day here in New York City, right after 4:00 Eastern, when all things, of course, when the power went down, and people immediately started walking, walking across the bridges, walking out of their offices, walking to try to get home, because it was almost impossible to do anything.

There was obviously a lot of cooperation. It was so hot, one of the first things that the New York city mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said, is, go ahead and drink a lot of water, because you're not going to have air conditioning. Dehydration is a huge problem, as you know, in these kinds of circumstances.

So people got together. They were drinking water. And we did see a run on bottled water in all sorts of stores. I walked about 30 blocks to get to where I am right now, and people were just anxiously running into supermarkets, running into stores, grocery stores, buying as much water as they possibly could. And fortunately, it's a little cooler now, as we all know, than it was earlier in the day.

So far, everything seems to be pretty calm, pretty quiet. Indeed, on some of the street corners we've been, Aaron, people almost have a festive atmosphere. They're pretty happy about it. And let's just hope things remain quiet and calm and people continue to cooperate as nicely as they have so far.

BROWN: Is there -- From, from the point that this began for you, and you started to work your way downtown, has the mood of people changed as it became clearer what this was, or perhaps what was it not?

BLITZER: There was a huge collective sigh of relief, because at the beginning, right after 4:00, when we all went through this, our worst fears were, God forbid this is terrorism. What has happened?

I was on the 21st floor of our building at Penn Plaza at CNN, and we were all pretty high, and, you know, your mind begins to wander, begins to worry what's going on. Do I stay up on the 21st floor? Or is this the time to start getting into the stairwells and start walking down 21 flights as quickly as possible?

Everybody at CNN, where I was, and we had our bureau snap into action, and all of our people got into the mode that we're all very good at, which is, namely, journalism, and we began to work. We began to see our alternate systems, how we would get on the air, how we would bring the news to our viewers.

And a team got together and did an excellent job in getting the job done.

So -- but sure, at the beginning, I am sure all of us were a little scared. We were wondering what was going on.

BROWN: Wolf, thank you. The fact is, we wouldn't be on the air, by and large, were it not for New York One, a cable news operation here in the city. We are enormously grateful for their help in getting us on the air and keeping us on the air and making sure this is working as well as it can work.

One of the stranger things, at least as I watched this tonight, waiting to come up here, is that New York television stations, of course, are on the air. I mean, they are broadcasting. But nobody in the city, by in large, no one in the city can see them. I am not sure who they are talking to. People were listening to radios. The radio stations were on the air, radio stations here, several all-news stations providing incredible service to people in New York.

But we expect that was true in Cleveland and Detroit and Toronto and all those other cities that have been affected.

Peter Viles is in Queens, I believe. Peter, if I'm wrong, tell me, but join us now, and tell us what you are able to report tonight from your location.

PETER VILES, CNN FINANCIAL NEWS: And you are correct, Aaron. We're in Queens, just across the river.

What you would see on a normal night behind me is the United Nations and the Empire State Building. Just to follow up on what you said about communications, a transistor radio became very valuable in the city of New York this afternoon. As you would see them on the streets, you would see people would gather around the transistor, what we are hearing.

But this has got to be the longest and slowest rush hour in the history of New York City, and it continues. I talked to one guy who had been walking for two and a half hours just to get to the 59th Street Bridge to get into Queens, where I am now. He figured he had another two and a half hours walking to go to get home. That guy is probably getting home about now, five hours after he left Wall Street.

But this is one of those nights. Everyone in New York is going to have a story, and a lot of the stories are, how did you get home? Let's hear a couple of those stories.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

VILES: So it was like a sea of humanity.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was, it was. Although this time, it was a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) that the sea of humanity wasn't freaked out. They were just calmly walking across the bridge, and they were in a much better mood than they were two years ago.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Being here during 9/11 and today, I think New York shows its best spirit during crisis. You see people just pull together and do what needs to be done, and you see funny sights of people just waiting it out and doing what they have to do. And, you know, we are here just relaxing, because, you know, there's nothing else to do this evening.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

VILES: You know, you do hear that there is something of a festive atmosphere, we've heard it from Wolf and from Anderson. But there is another side to this. There is a human toll here. When we got across the bridge from New York, it was a hot day today, a number of elderly women came up to us and asked us, how could they get home? They had miles to go, miles they had never walked. They take the bus. The buses are not running.

So there was a fair amount of confusion. There is calm in the city, but I would say there's an edge to it tonight, Aaron. And now that we may know that this is not terrorism, still, when will the power come on? The lights behind me are not power returning. Those are generators, Aaron.

BROWN: Well, well, and I guess, as most people know, this is not New York, it's not a city of single-family houses by and large. You've got apartment building, six stories, 10 stories, 20 stories. Those apartments are very, very warm tonight.

Hospitals, by and large, were able to stay in business, with generators. Up at Harlem, we know they were quite busy. They had a lot of heat-related and anxiety-related problems to deal with.

But in terms of large-scale problems, mostly things have gone pretty well. New Yorkers have a great -- as a transplanted New Yorker, New Yorkers have a great, What can you do about it? quality to them. They, they -- we, we tend to roll with the punches here pretty well. There were a lot of punches thrown at the city on a hot summer day, and in other cities too today, and the city seems to be rolling with them.

Detroit was another city that was hit by all of this. We haven't had as much reporting out of these other cities for sort of obvious reasons. It's hard to communicate in a situation where you are talking about the lack of electricity.

Eric Leaf is with WJBJ in Detroit. I hope I got that right. VBG in Detroit. And he joins us now to give us an update on what things are like there -- Eric.

ERIC LEAF, REPORTER, WVBJ, DETROIT: Good evening, Aaron.

Two-point-one million metro Detroiters have been without power roughly since 4:00 this afternoon, and we have to say, for the most part, things have gone very well, for all things considered, with power being out in such an expansive area.

People have pretty much gone about their business. Obviously surprised and some shock when the power went out, much like in the other cities across the United States, but everyone pretty much behaving themselves. We've had no major incidents to report.

There have been a couple of fires, which the fire department has been able to get under control.

We have some video to show you that taken just a short while ago. What you -- (audio interrupt) ... or you would find much activity in the nighttime anyway in the downtown area, unless there was a professional sporting event, a baseball game going on, or such.

And tonight, really, especially so, you will find that the downtown is very quiet. Very little foot traffic. Very little automobile traffic. And what traffic there is, we're happy to report, people are adhering to the rules of the road. Of course, the traffic lights are out, so people are having to go simply on the honor system, and so far they have done that.

The mayor of the city, Kwame Kilpatrick (ph), has been commending his citizens all night for essentially doing the right thing, and also looking out after their neighbors, and trying to really care for the elderly, and those people with special needs.

We can report that the area hospitals, and there are two level- one trauma centers in metro Detroit, total, only one in the city proper, and we're told that all the hospitals are doing quite well, as better to be expected actually.

Right now the hospitals are open, and they are operating under pretty much normal conditions, dealing with traumas, and they are even conducting emergency surgeries. But when you move outside the emergency rooms, they have all about ceased any other kind of activity. Operations for tonight and tomorrow are probably going to be called off.

As far as when the power will come back on in metro Detroit, for the 2.1 million customers anxiously awaiting for that to happen, there was a press conference here at the power company, DTE Energy, about a half hour or so ago, and they told us that it's going to be several days.

At first, they were hoping that maybe sporadically power would come on in pockets of metro Detroit by tonight, but simply that was just perhaps a little bit too ambitious, and perhaps a little naive.

They are now saying that it could be days before the power comes back on.

One thing that is a little discouraging that we have to report in the Detroit area, there have been a couple of isolated reports of price gouging. We had a report from one of our viewers tell us that at a convenience store, someone was selling a case of bottled water for $175. We had the state attorney general on our air earlier this evening, and of course he said that he would aggressively pursue these people who are taking advantage of people in these times.

So that's pretty much the situation in Detroit, without power. But doing the best to sort of get by.

In Detroit, I am Eric Leaf for CNN. Aaron, back to you. BROWN: Eric, this -- One quick question. This will help me get a sense of how big a crisis we have. Are the casinos in Detroit open or closed tonight?

LEAF: No, everything essentially in the downtown area is closed.

BROWN: OK.

LEAF: And the power company telling us that downtown Detroit will be without power tomorrow. So they've actually asked that people take the day off tomorrow and consider this a three-day weekend.

BROWN: OK, Eric, nicely done. Eric Leaf, who is in Detroit. Two million people in Detroit without power, and stories like those being told tonight in Cleveland and Toronto and parts of New Jersey. And, of course, here in New York.

Our coverage continues after this short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, I suspect had it not been for our lead story tonight would have been the capture of an important al Qaeda operative in southeast Asia. It is a reminder there was other news going on today that would have been reported had it not been, but it was.

Fredricka Whitfield is in Atlanta with a quick overview of some of the other events of the day -- Fredricka.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, Aaron.

Here are some of the other stories we're following for you this evening.

Law enforcement sources say a senior al Qaeda leader known as Hambali has been arrested in Thailand. He's accused of planning last week's explosion at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, last year's nightclub bombings in Bali, and possibly the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.

The U.N. Security Council is still waiting for Libya to deliver a promised letter accepting financial responsibility for the 1989 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. U.S. officials claim France is holding up the settlement because it's trying to get similar compensation for the 1989 bombing of a French airliner.

Meantime, French health officials say as many as 3,000 French citizens have died in the heat wave there. Critics say the French government has done a poor job of managing the crisis.

Now we're going to go back to our continuing coverage of the blackout. Let's go back to Aaron.

BROWN: Fredricka, thank you very much.

Josie Burke is up in Lewiston, New York, right, Lewiston, New York, which is essentially at Niagara Falls, which, when we sort this all out, it may or may not turn out to be ground zero in this. But it is certainly in the early reporting a sense that this -- that this part of the Mohawk power grid is what started it all. And Josie has been doing some reporting up there. Josie, good evening.

JOSIE BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron.

We're about four miles north of Niagara Falls here, and I'm standing outside the New York State Power Authority. And there were a lot of rumors swirling this evening that perhaps a lightning strike here actually caused the power outage throughout the East Coast.

And I'm joined now by Joanne Willmott, who is the regional director of community relations for the New York State Power Authority.

And first, Joanne, we have heard it shot down before, but maybe you can do it again one time with a little finality. No lightning strike?

JOANNE WILLMOTT, REGIONAL MANAGER, COMMUNITY RELATIONS, NEW YORK STATE POWER AUTHORITY: No lightning strike. We're still not sure what caused this widespread power outage, but we do know for a certainty that it was not the result of a lightning strike here at the Niagara project.

BURKE: Can you go into any details about what can be done from this particular place to try to determine just what happened?

WILLMOTT: Well, the power project here at Niagara, as well as our other large hydro project in northern New York, have continued to operate throughout this situation.

So we're working along with the other utilities and the New York State Independent System Operator, who oversees and coordinates all the generation. We're working to get New York State back online. Our units are generating. The state is slowly coming back, and areas are being restored to power.

So it will be some time, though, before we're probably able to determine what caused this outage.

BURKE: Did you see any sort of slowdown? Any sort of brownout, anything out of the norm here? Or everything was business as usual, while the rest of this part of the country was suffering a blackout?

WILLMOTT: We did experience here at the project kind of a dip in generation around 4:00, 4:10 this afternoon, which is when this all started. However, we recovered very quickly. Our units came back up into service. And again, we've been generating power. So right now, we're producing about 2,400 megawatts of electricity.

BURKE: And can you just explain for the person sitting at home, who doesn't necessarily understand everything that goes into generating power, just what is done here? And how a vital this particular power authority is to producing power everywhere? WILLMOTT: Sure. We use water from the Niagara River here to generate electricity at the Niagara project. This is the largest generating station in New York State, and actually one of the largest in the country. On any given day, we generate about 10 percent of this state's electricity. So it's a vital resource for New York State and certainly for the region as a whole.

BURKE: So is the question that you're trying to figure out, the one that comes to mind, if you never really lost power here, and you are supplying most of the power to the state, how did most of state lose power?

WILLMOTT: Well, again, we provide maybe 10 percent at any given time of this state's energy. But again, we're just part of the overall picture. We're all interconnected to other utilities and other transmission systems, and a failure at one place can, you know, cause a system-wide problem like we're experiencing tonight.

But again, we'll be working with the other utilities and the New York ISO to restore this state, and then to certainly determine what in fact may have caused this.

BURKE: And is there anything at all you can tell us? Any indications at this point in time, from your vantage point, about what might have caused this?

WILLMOTT: We don't know, and that's puzzling, obviously, and we'll be working again to make that determination.

BURKE: Joanne, thank you very much for your time tonight. Obviously, a very busy time here.

Aaron, I know you have been getting some anecdotal evidence from people out in the field this evening. We drove in from Rochester, took about an hour and a half this evening, and while we could look around from the highway, left and right, saw some power outage, the toll booths along the New York State Thruway, and they're working, full working order, you still have to pay. Back to you.

BROWN: Well, of course! I get that. Josie, you were up, you were on your way, I guess, to cover the PGA up in Rochester. And you got sidetracked a bit. Thank you very much for your work tonight. Josie Burke.

BURKE: Thanks, Aaron.

BROWN: Let me just show you briefly a part of New York, a part of New York that many of you are familiar with, but it will look quite different to you. This is Times Square tonight in the heart of Manhattan.

On any normal night -- goodness, on any normal day -- there is more light and more electric usage in Times Square than almost anywhere else in the United States.

But not tonight. All of those giant TV screens, all of those news tickers on all of those broadcast facilities that docked Times Square are dark tonight. All of those restaurants that serve the large theater complexes that exist around Broadway and not just a bit off of Times Square dark tonight.

Times Square, this great central gathering place in the center of Manhattan, is dark tonight. But it doesn't mean that people aren't there. Lots of people have gone down because, honestly, even on a good night, New Yorkers don't hang around the house that much. It's -- apartments are small, and unless you have got good air conditioning, they can be a bit warm.

So it's a place where people do come out and mingle on the streets. They would rather, I assume, be sitting in a restaurant tonight than hanging out in Times Square, but that's where they are tonight. But there's no light there for them. There's no light at all.

Jim Gilmore is the former governor of Virginia, and he joins us from Washington tonight. He's been thinking about and working on the homeland security aspect of this crisis.

I think crisis is a fair word, isn't it, governor?

JIM GILMORE, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORISM: Well, certainly has been an incident. I think that a crisis, of course, sometime in the future, could be a great deal worse if it's a deliberative attack, if there are mass casualties.

We haven't seen that tonight. But we have seen a reaction to a situation that I think has been a good one. There's been good communication between federal, state, and local authorities. Local responders were prepared. There was no sense of panic or anxiety.

Things can get worse, and there needs to be more preparation and more work, but certainly the private sector has a lot to be proud of tonight as they have begun to restore power in this reasonable way.

BROWN: Let me work out a couple of those things, if I may. You talked about communications. Can you give me an example of what you mean, the communications worked?

GILMORE: Well, I mean that the Department of Homeland Security was in touch with the affected governors, and then also with local elected officials, Mayor Bloomberg, of course, was very much apparent and in charge of the situation in New York City. And I think there was good communication back and forth between officials, elected officials, and the private sector.

But there is still, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), there's still, Aaron, a lot work to be done. We still have to be thinking how we get the private sector fully engaged in the national program to protect the critical infrastructure.

Because we have to remember, tonight it was an electrical power grid, and it wasn't any kind of attack, but it could be anything. It could be nuclear plants, could be chemical plants. It could be any number of other types of critical infrastructures.

And we have to be thinking about this and be vigilant, but not at the same time overreact. And certainly tonight we did not see any overreaction anywhere in the affected area.

BROWN: Is this -- You know, we -- In the last couple of years, governor, all of us, you, those of us in the news business, and, I think, people watching these newscasts, have all thought a lot about the vulnerabilities of the infrastructure.

I don't know that many of us thought about the electric grids so much as maybe we thought about a nuclear power plant here or there. Does it surprise you, you were governor of a state, privy to a lot of stuff, does it surprise you that what we were dealing with was a massive failure of the grid?

GILMORE: Well, in fact, I was governor of one of the two states that were directly attacked at the 9/11 attack, New York and Virginia, with the Pentagon, and in northern Virginia. And, you know, it, of course, while this is surprising, I think that it gives us an opportunity to go in there and look and see exactly what did occur.

What is the nature of this? First, you see, we saw tonight a spike-up. Because there's always this sense that if anything dramatic happens in the United States, oh, my gosh, now it's a terrorist attack. And so that's our first reaction.

And now we're sort in a relief mode. Oh, gosh, we can be festive and relaxed, because it really wasn't a terrorist attack. And the private sector's going to work to put things back in shape. The elected officials are in shape.

Now, I think we've got to go to work and find out what happened here. Why did this happen? And how come there really weren't firewalls or redundancies or ways of circumscribing this type of situation before it spread over so much of the part of the United States that it did?

And then you have to take those lessons and apply it to other parts of the critical infrastructure as well.

And we're in the process of doing that, I know. Much has already been done. And I think that's been demonstrated by the reaction tonight. But we still have a great deal more to do, Aaron.

BROWN: Governor, it's good to talk to you again. I think there will be lots of interesting questions asked about the role both of the private sector, in terms of the electric grid, and the government, and how they relate, and how much regulation is enough, and how much is too much, and whether there's too much, or not enough. I think those are questions for the day ahead. Thank you very much.

I think the question that New Yorkers have, and certainly the question everyone who's living through this in various parts of country has, when the power's coming back on. Maria Hinojosa joins us again from Con Edison, the major New York utility. And I believe, I suspect, looking at some of the information that's gone on the screen, that she can give us an update on when power may be coming back, at least in the New York area -- Maria.

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on phone): Aaron, some very good news that we just heard from one of the spokespeople here at Con Edison. They are telling us that major metropolitan New York will have power back by 1:00 a.m. this morning, and the areas around the grid, they said, should have power sometime -- (audio interrupt) ... something more definitive than what we had just heard before, where they were saying that they were not going to be able to give us any kind of determination about when power would be back.

But just a few minutes ago, we have heard that they are now telling us that major metropolitan New York should have power back by 1:00 a.m., and the areas around the grid of New York, around 8:00 a.m.

Something else, Aaron, about two minutes ago, when we were sitting in the car waiting to report this, suddenly we saw lots of lights flashing outside of our car. Of course, the question was, where is the light coming from? Several police cars pulled up. We turned around. And Mayor Bloomberg just walked out and made his way up to the -- probably the 16th floor of the Con Ed headquarters here on 15th street and Irving Plaza.

He did not give any comment. He said he would talk to us when he comes out. But the New Yorkers who saw him immediately started yelling at him, "Mr. Mayor, turn the lights back on!" And he smiled and went into the building.

So we will have an update on what Mayor Bloomberg has to say within a few moments' time, Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Maria, help me understand one quick thing, and I need you to be fairly brief here. We -- for New Yorkers who are listening, I am not quite sure how they are listening, when you talk about metro New York, are you just talking about the five boroughs of New York? Or are you talking about Long Island, are you talking about Westchester? What do we mean by metro New York?

HINOJOSA: It appears that they're talking about just the five major boroughs, Aaron. We had heard reports earlier this evening that they had restored power in some sectors of the South Bronx, Throgs Neck, and Westchester.

But right now, what it appears they are saying is that metropolitan New York, that would be the five boroughs -- and we'll try to get confirmation, Aaron, whether or not that means it will extend any further.

But they did want to get -- tell us that at least by 1:00 a.m., their words, major metropolitan New York will have power back by 1:00 a.m., and the areas around that, that might be the more extensive metropolitan area, not until 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Maria, thank you very much. We'll sort out what precisely metro New York means and more.

We will take a break. Our coverage of this extraordinary day and night continues on CNN.

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Aired August 14, 2003 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again everyone in what will go down surely as one of the stranger days in a strange period of years here in New York City and across the East Coast of the United States.
Think about it for a second. In three minutes, just three minutes, 21 power plants went down across the east and millions of people, tens of millions of people saw darkness right then. Subways with thousands of people here in New York stopped running. Elevators with people trying to get out of high rises stopped until generators could go back on.

All of this in three minutes at a little past 4:00 Eastern time for reasons we still do not yet know. What has happened today in the United States, or at least in the eastern part of the United States has raised, as you just heard for those of you who were watching Larry tonight, has raised profound questions about the state of the electric grid in the United States.

But those are questions in large measure for tomorrow. Tonight's questions have to do with when will the power get on and how are millions of people across the east coping?

New York tonight largely is dark. We have a series of pictures we can show you, live pictures from New York. First, there are we are told by the mayor small pockets of the city, areas of the Bronx, areas of Queens where power has come back on.

Parts of Westchester, which is a very large county to the north, driving Westchester the length of Westchester north to south would take you about an hour to give you a sense of how large a county it is. You've got millions of people up there. They are slowly getting power.

That's in the New York area. I think we have a picture of the Empire State Building. You'll see a little bit of light in it, a little bit of light in it. On a normal night that would be a spectacular scene down in the lower part of Midtown in Manhattan on 34th Street, the great Empire State Building mostly dark tonight.

But this is not simply a New York story, of course, because millions of people have been affected as far north as Toronto and Ottawa in Canada where they continue to have power problems tonight.

People in Cleveland have had power problems since late this afternoon as well and as far west as Detroit and we have live pictures out of Detroit tonight to show you what that city looks like.

In most of these places most of the power is still out. In some of these places, parts of New Jersey for example, power never went out. In some parts of New Jersey we could see in Jersey City power has already come back on, at least in parts of Jersey City.

So, slowly but surely, to use the president's phrase about an hour and a half ago, slowly the grid or work-arounds the grid are kicking in and there is some concern that if power came on all at once all of those air-conditioners, computers and all the rest that were left on when the power went off at a little past 4:00 would cause a huge problem.

Slowly, the problems are being solved. Whether they're solved tonight, tomorrow, we don't yet know. We hope to find out in the next hour or so what the best estimates are.

Jeanne Meserve covers primarily national security questions or homeland security questions for us. It is not a stretch to say, I suspect, that when most of you heard about this for the first time the first thought that went into your mind was, was it a terrorist attack of some sort of another? I assume, Jeanne, that was your first question as well.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was and the answer was at first we just don't know but as the evening progressed the answer came back no, not terrorism. We believe this was caused by some kind of technical problem. What exactly that was we still don't know.

There have been a variety of reports, many of them shot down. At one point we heard it might have been a lightning strike on a power plant in Niagara Falls, New York. Authorities there strongly deny it, say the plant in Niagara Falls was up and operating, in fact was a rock of the system through this entire episode.

Then we heard perhaps it was a lightning strike or a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says not so. All of those plants were fine, no reports of any problems whatsoever. So, that investigation will continue.

According to one authority I spoke to in the electric industry it may be several days before they figure out precisely what it was that might have caused this problem but it was incredibly striking.

We have some graphics to show you. Genscape is a company which monitors the output of power plants for power traders and it has this on its Web site. Look at all those red marks.

Those are power plants that were operating between zero and 39 percent at about 4:15 this afternoon, look at them all. Most of those we can presume, given what happened, probably were operating at zero percent capability.

And then we have another thing to show you. This is a graphic again from the Genscape Web site. This shows you what happened at one power plant in Dunkirk, New York. Power production is going along at a relatively regular rate and then suddenly it falls off.

According to Genscape from its monitoring between 4:10 and 4:13 this afternoon 21 plants shut down. Nine nuclear power plants remain offline at this point in time. I'm advised that this is something totally normal. When the grid goes down there's no place for those plants to put their electricity and so they are shut down. They will be brought back online gradually as the grid comes up and begins functioning once again.

As for the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Ridge immediately set up his crisis action team. They began to interface with the electrical industry. I should say 85 percent of the electrical infrastructure in this country is in private hands so that's a very important link for them to establish.

Also, they set up their communications with the affected state and local officials. In addition, they began monitoring critical sectors, including transportation and border crossings. Most of the border crossings operated fairly regularly through this except for the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit. There were some delays of 20 to 30 minutes or so.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security are very pleased at this point with how things went. The one problem they had, of course is not knowing what caused this. They still don't have the answer to that but they point to New York City, the pictures or orderly evacuations there and say this just proves that all this planning that we've been putting into disaster preparedness are paying off.

People knew how to do this. There was no panic. There was good communications. Of course, they're going to be continuing to examine their response and the local and state response and the industry response over the days to come to try and determine more about what they might improve.

Another thing they've been poised to do is respond to any requests from any states for emergency assistance. At this point in time remarkably enough, Aaron, there have been no requests at all that have come in to the Department of Homeland Security - back to you.

BROWN: The department has done a lot of mock drills over the last several months to see how they respond to various scenarios. This was not a mock drill. This was a real dry run of how homeland security, at least, as one agency in the government would handle a real crisis, not a terrorist crisis in this case. Is there a sense there, and I assume they'll say everything went pretty well, is there a sense there that things, systems did work?

MESERVE: There is within the department. This, I'm told, is probably the biggest event they've had to handle, real life event they've had to handle since the department was set up. They do feel that it went fairly well from their perspective.

I will tell you that I did talk to one person at the state level who felt that the communication could have been clearer. He felt that they were not getting enough information about what was going on.

But if what the Department of Homeland Security tells me is true that may be because they couldn't get information about what was going on. This was such a complex situation and they weren't getting the information they needed fast enough from the electrical industry.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you very much and I know you'll continue trying to figure out what went wrong and how people have responded to it and we'll check back with you.

I thought it was interesting to hear Jeanne report that the Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said this is an example of how systems work, how prepared the city of New York is.

I think it is fair to say anyone who was here on September 11, now almost two years ago, knows how New Yorkers handle a crisis and by and large this was an enormous crisis in the city, as you can image, a hot summer day, the end of the work day, and all of the reports that we've heard, all of the reports that we've heard have said New Yorkers handled this the way they handle so many other things, a sense of calm, a sense of decency.

A lot of people - there are people at the tunnels, at the Holland and Lincoln tunnels that go under the river over to New Jersey, people standing outside with signs saying I need a ride, give me a lift, trying to get home because none of the trains were running and the subways weren't running and the trains that go across the river weren't running.

And, people were stopping and picking them up, getting them home. Still tonight, thousands of people, tens of thousands of people we dare say are stuck in the city, people who would have taken either the trains north to Long Island and to Westchester, two major areas of New York, people stuck here, people who would have gone to New Jersey.

Busses are moving some of them but hotels, as you can imagine, are packed. Restaurants closed, shops closed, the city is calm. There are no reports of any of the kinds of things that you would worry about.

Anderson Cooper is on the upper east side of New York and he can give us a better sense of what things are like in that part of Manhattan tonight - Anderson, good evening.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron, and I can tell you all day long for the last four or five hours I've been walking the streets of New York and have seen just hundreds and hundreds of New Yorkers.

And, as you said, I mean their reactions are as varied as the citizens of the city. Some people react with anger and frustration, some with humor, but it is calm and, as you say, in particular where I am, 73rd Street and First Avenue, outside a bar called Session 73, this is a very unique New York reaction to the events of today.

This bar here has basically - as you can see, people have been here for several hours. The bar started selling beers here shortly after the blackout for $2. They're not up to $6 and the place is packed.

I don't know if you can see down here. They've actually put couches onto the street and everyone is just hanging out and there are candles and it's really sort of a big party as you can see, very festive. They've had a few I think some of them.

Come over here. Let me introduce you to someone. This is David. David, and this is your daughter Pilar (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pilar, right.

COOPER: How long have you been here at this bar?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, Pilar's been here about 5:30 and I came at about 7:30.

COOPER: I was talking to David before and he's had a very upper east side reaction to this blackout if I may say. A lot of people grab essential foods. David has grabbed what he felt was essential. What food have you rescued from your apartment?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, we grabbed a little (unintelligible) from the cupboard and brought it out here and we're having a great time.

COOPER: And just in case you think he's joking, he actually does have the (unintelligible) right here. It's actually quite tasty. So, it's a very unique New York reaction to this very unique day - Aaron, back to you.

BROWN: Well, for those of you who don't know the city, the upper east side is thought of as sort of a Tony (ph) part of town and so (unintelligible) fits in. They're no doubt having espressos on the upper west side of New York tonight if they can get the machines to work, which they probably can't.

The question in the city and through much of the East Coast still tonight is when will the power come back on? By and large that's just not known. We wish we could tell you that. We can't.

Maria Hinojosa has been down at Con Edison. Con Ed is the electrical supplier, the major utility here. We assume you can hear that siren in the background. We have heard very few sirens tonight but we sure hear that one. Maria Hinojosa is on the phone, I believe, at Con Ed - Maria.

OK, we'll try and get Maria back. Obviously, the situation at Con Ed here in New York in the city is a little chaotic. They, too, are trying to answer the question that we're trying to answer which is when will parts of Manhattan start to see power again?

John King has been working the story most of the afternoon from Washington and John joins us tonight from there, John good evening. JOHN KING, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, a fascinating day here in Washington as we watch the developments power on throughout the day here in Washington.

Of course, as you were just discussing with Jeanne Meserve, the initial question and the initial fear in Washington was is this a terrorist attack? As Jeanne recounted the government mobilized quickly to try to get the answer to that question.

Many more questions tonight but the president, who was in California, answered one of them emphatically when he spoke to reporters earlier in the eight o'clock hour, late in the eight o'clock hour here on the East Coast, the president speaking in California said five words I'm certain all Americans wanted to hear when he said: "This is not a terrorist attack."

The president saying the federal government was looking for answers as to how this happened today. He said the federal government would make any resources necessary available to the affected states. So far, we are told no requests of the federal government.

But, on the key issue that will come up tomorrow and the next day once the power is brought back up in these major cities, what happened here and is this country ill-prepared for such a thing? Does the electrical grid need to be modernized? The president said he thinks the answer is yes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We'll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does and I've said so all along but this will be a - this is going to be an interesting lesson for our country and we'll have to respond to it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: A lesson for the new Department of Homeland Security and other agencies post 9/11, preparedness planning that most here in Washington believe the government passed today.

But, Aaron, as this debate continues in the days, weeks, and certainly months ahead many will say if the president thinks the grid should be modernized he should break the electricity part of federal energy legislation out of the bill.

That bill has been held up throughout the Bush administration because of disputes over drilling for oil and gas in Alaska, for example, other disputes, partisan disputes in Congress. One lesson here in Washington might be focus on electricity. Deal with other controversies a bit later. We will see how that all plays out but much more pressing questions, of course, at the moment.

BROWN: John, let me throw a couple at you since you've been dealing with a lot of this, this afternoon and this evening, tonight. We talk about the power grid. Are we talking about something the federal government owns or the federal government regulates?

KING: Well, the federal government owns less of it and the federal government regulates less of it than five years ago or ten years ago because of the deregulation of the energy industry. So, the federal government owns very little of this.

The federal government stepped in after 9/11 mostly to focus on security measures are especially nuclear power plants but also the grid, are they vulnerable to nuclear attacks -- are they vulnerable to terrorist attacks, excuse me?

That was the focus after 9/11, much less focus from the federal perspective on the capacity of the grid and could it withstand something like this? California, of course, had the energy crisis that is a part of the root. You see Governor Gray Davis dealing with the problems right now.

So, in terms of capacity and the ability to handle it and the lack, as we saw today, of firewalls, if one plant goes down can you stop the cascading effect of other states? Those will be questions that come in and, as we have been discussing this today with former energy secretary Bill Richardson, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, many of them saying deregulation has gone too far.

The industry, of course, says that is not the case but it says it could use some help from the federal government in modernizing things. So, that will be a policy debate that will come out of all of this that we're seeing today.

BROWN: And, just quickly in looking at the energy bill, just to underscore something, most of the discussion, I'm not sure of every detail in the bill and

I suspect you're not sure of every detail in the bill either, but we have talked about the supply, how do we increase the amount of energy? We haven't talked very much about the mechanism that literally gets it from Point A through the system to your house and mine, fair?

KING: A very fair point and you can be certain I don't know every detail in this bill. The electricity debate goes back to the Clinton administration, the debate about modernizing the grid, whether the federal government should have more control, how much deregulation is too much deregulation if there is such a thing. It depends on who you talk to.

That has not been a focus of much public debate and we should admit in our business not the much focus of great media coverage because it's not terribly a sexy issue until you see something like this happen.

In Washington, the controversy has been over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, other energy issues that get caught up in a partisan debate. You can be certain, at least in the short term, there will be a great deal of focus on what is the federal role in making sure something like this cannot and does not happen again. BROWN: John, thank you very much, John King our Senior White House Correspondent and now energy expert in Washington tonight, thank you.

I imagine and I know it's true of me, I suspect it's true of most of you, we've all gone through power outages in our time whether it's a lightning strike, a bad thunderstorm, a this and a that but it probably never occurred to any of us, or at least not most of us, that one problem somewhere on the line somewhere could wipe out electricity to this huge corner, this most populated corner of the United States which is exactly what happened today.

Let's try again to get Maria Hinojosa who is at Con Edison, Consolidated Edison, the major electrical utility here in New York and in parts outside of New York as well - Maria.

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Hi, Aaron.

Well, we just had a report now from a spokesman here in front of Con Ed which I have to say, Aaron, it's one of the eeriest sites to be in front of the headquarters, the administrative headquarters of Con Ed and to see all of these officials walking around with their flashlights in the lobby and then holding a press conference in the dark.

But what they did say is they have begun what he called a careful process of restoring power. He did say that this is a mechanical process and that it's pretty much a slow and deliberate one. What they were able to confirm is they have been able to restore power in parts of the Bronx and Westchester but that is about it at this point.

They said that the command center upstairs is in touch with the control centers all across the city and as power becomes available to Con Edison then they determine where it can go. He said it's a technical process about where it can go.

It's not as if they're making a decision about what part of the city needs it the most but rather it's more of a question of what is able to technically download this electricity that they get in.

When we asked him whether or not when we start to see this power will it be full power or will it be more of a brownout he said we have to see about that and that there was no way for him to determine when power would be back entirely.

When I asked him very specifically about 6:00 a.m. would there be power restored by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning he said there is no way we can speculate as to whether or not that would happen.

Now interestingly, Aaron, we are just a block away from Union Square Park so as opposed to what Anderson was reporting on before with the bar and kind of an atmosphere of joining around this bar, in Union Square Park you're having more of a cultural expression. There are poets reciting poetry. You've got drummers who are drumming.

The police were out in small groups of about a half a dozen or so. When I asked them if everything was calm they said everything is calm. We're just here to make sure that everybody is having a good time but you're seeing people walking around the streets of New York City with flashlights, with candles, and yes there is at least down here very much a sentiment of calm and of people enjoying this and staying out.

When I saw some people out with their kids, carrying their kids in their little backpacks behind them, these are you know little toddlers, they said well it's too hot to stay inside so we're just going to walk around until they fall asleep and then go back home.

So, what we know from Con Ed is that there is no way that they can speculate as to when power will return but at least down here people are taking it in stride and handling it with a sense of calm - Aaron.

BROWN: (AUDIO GAP) how to get power back on through the neighborhoods of Cleveland. It's what's going on in Detroit. It's going on in Toronto. It's going on in big cities and small cities.

We heard reports that Albany, the capital of New York, has gotten much - a fair amount of its power back on but getting these systems back on is not a simple thing. You don't want it to come on too fast because it will overload, essentially blow a fuse and we're back to where we started.

So, they are trying to get it back on but it is a slow process and, as Maria reported, at least here in New York there is no guarantee that tomorrow morning people will awake, assuming they can sleep on this hot summer night, they will awake to power.

Our coverage continues after a short break. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: That's the most light you'll see in the city of New York tonight, at least most of the city of New York coming up on 10:30 Eastern time on a very warm and very memorable summer night across the east and across the country as the power is out.

Winn Schwartaw is with a company called Security Awareness. They do most cyber security and he joins us tonight. One of the things, Winn, that I wondered about when I first heard about this is was this the worm? We've talked about this worm that has been infecting hundreds of thousands of computers, large and small, can we say definitively it was not the worm?

WINN SCHWARTAW, SECURITY AWARENESS CO.: Nothing is 100 percent ever but I think that we have a darn good idea that the odds of it being involved are extraordinarily low. It certainly looks like a typical power failure or, not typical, but it's a power failure.

BROWN: Well, let me play with that for a second because to me it doesn't look like a typical power failure. A typical power failure would blow the power out in a small city or a county in the worst of circumstances but not the entire region. In what sense then is this typical?

SCHWARTAW: Well, I think that something has occurred in the last ten years. If we go back to the early '90s when the telecommunications had some problems, we had a cascade effect where one switch went bad and then subsequently a lot of the country went out.

We've seen the same thing with the critical infrastructure of transportation, with airlines. We see the same thing with the psychology of the financial markets. When something goes wrong there's a cascade effect.

And, in this case, we've seen the cascade effect within the power grid up in the Niagara-Mohawk region in the way that they're tied together and in they cyber world with the worm that you spoke of, same kind of thing. There are cascade effects that multiply as a result of us having so many things tied together and we haven't completely dealt with how to solve that yet.

BROWN: At the risk of asking the unanswerable why hasn't it happened before? Why is that we to my memory we've never seen anything of this scale affect the electric grid?

SCHWARTAW: Because there's more and more. Since the big power outage in New York in '77, there was some congressional changes in the way that the power grids had to work with each other, the way that power is distributed, the way that the load balancing is done.

And, in order to make things more efficient there was more integration of the various systems and, when you have more integration, unless you're planning on a regular basis for something to go wrong you tend to kind of assume that things are going to be OK and that's a false assumption that we've had for the last ten, 12 years.

BROWN: Is it reasonable that a bolt of lightning did this?

SCHWARTAW: I am not a power grid expert but if a bolt of lightning hit a critical node and there were not break points or the power equivalent of a firewall between various portions in the grid, theoretically yes. I think we're going to find out those answers over the next several days.

BROWN: And, is it preventable or is it a kind of lucky strike if a bolt of lightning or a small fire or whatever this turns out to be are we going to always be in some respect or another at risk of this happening either in the northeast or the southwest or anywhere else in the country?

SCHWARTAW: It's preventable in the future if we take certain steps to look at how to deal with disasters, how to deal with whether it's a cyber event or, in this case a power event, that when something goes wrong do we have the mechanisms in place to disconnect the area that is wrong that's causing the trouble from everything else so that we don't spread the problem? Can we isolate the problem? This is true in the world of networks. It's true with the worlds of worms and viruses and it's certainly going to be more and more true as we investigate how the power grids operate.

BROWN: Do you think it's possible this was a human error of some sort?

SCHWARTAW: I'm kind of glad you brought that up. A lot of the folks that I've spoken to today said, al Qaeda and terrorists and I said I just don't buy it. I do not believe that the bad guys came in from the outside and did it.

However, if I were in charge of this investigation, I certainly would want to take a look at some of the insiders that had access to some of the significant controls throughout the systems because one of the things that we worry about now is not so much the outsiders from the Internet getting in and doing damage but an insider who has malicious intent who has the access to do damage and that's something that I'd be, I'd want to look at a little bit more closely.

BROWN: Would it have to be someone who had malicious intent as opposed to someone who spilled a cup of coffee on control board somewhere?

SCHWARTAW: Again, I'm not an expert of how power plants operate. It could be an oops, it could be lightning, it could be a combination of them, and it could be malicious. But in this case, I just don't believe it was malicious, and I hope that I'm proven right. I hope that it's just a pure accident, and that we can recover from it, and learn how to handle these types of events better in the future.

BROWN: Winn, thanks for joining us.

Some interesting things to think about. We're all slowly, very slowly in some of our cases, coming to understand the complexity of the electric grid, the electrical system in the country, how interconnected it is. That is clearly a huge part of the story in the days ahead.

For tonight, though, I think the larger part of the story is how people in Cleveland and Detroit and Toronto and Ottawa and parts of Cape Cod and here, there, and everywhere across the Northeast are coping.

Wolf Blitzer has been on the streets of New York, down here in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York. Has been talking to people, and he joins us now. Wolf, good evening.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, Aaron.

They are coping very well so far under bad circumstances, circumstances that presumably are going to get worse in the coming hours before electricity is restored here in Manhattan.

We are told electricity coming back slowly in other parts of New York City, in the Bronx and elsewhere.

We have some pictures we're going to show you of what was going on earlier in the day here in New York City, right after 4:00 Eastern, when all things, of course, when the power went down, and people immediately started walking, walking across the bridges, walking out of their offices, walking to try to get home, because it was almost impossible to do anything.

There was obviously a lot of cooperation. It was so hot, one of the first things that the New York city mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said, is, go ahead and drink a lot of water, because you're not going to have air conditioning. Dehydration is a huge problem, as you know, in these kinds of circumstances.

So people got together. They were drinking water. And we did see a run on bottled water in all sorts of stores. I walked about 30 blocks to get to where I am right now, and people were just anxiously running into supermarkets, running into stores, grocery stores, buying as much water as they possibly could. And fortunately, it's a little cooler now, as we all know, than it was earlier in the day.

So far, everything seems to be pretty calm, pretty quiet. Indeed, on some of the street corners we've been, Aaron, people almost have a festive atmosphere. They're pretty happy about it. And let's just hope things remain quiet and calm and people continue to cooperate as nicely as they have so far.

BROWN: Is there -- From, from the point that this began for you, and you started to work your way downtown, has the mood of people changed as it became clearer what this was, or perhaps what was it not?

BLITZER: There was a huge collective sigh of relief, because at the beginning, right after 4:00, when we all went through this, our worst fears were, God forbid this is terrorism. What has happened?

I was on the 21st floor of our building at Penn Plaza at CNN, and we were all pretty high, and, you know, your mind begins to wander, begins to worry what's going on. Do I stay up on the 21st floor? Or is this the time to start getting into the stairwells and start walking down 21 flights as quickly as possible?

Everybody at CNN, where I was, and we had our bureau snap into action, and all of our people got into the mode that we're all very good at, which is, namely, journalism, and we began to work. We began to see our alternate systems, how we would get on the air, how we would bring the news to our viewers.

And a team got together and did an excellent job in getting the job done.

So -- but sure, at the beginning, I am sure all of us were a little scared. We were wondering what was going on.

BROWN: Wolf, thank you. The fact is, we wouldn't be on the air, by and large, were it not for New York One, a cable news operation here in the city. We are enormously grateful for their help in getting us on the air and keeping us on the air and making sure this is working as well as it can work.

One of the stranger things, at least as I watched this tonight, waiting to come up here, is that New York television stations, of course, are on the air. I mean, they are broadcasting. But nobody in the city, by in large, no one in the city can see them. I am not sure who they are talking to. People were listening to radios. The radio stations were on the air, radio stations here, several all-news stations providing incredible service to people in New York.

But we expect that was true in Cleveland and Detroit and Toronto and all those other cities that have been affected.

Peter Viles is in Queens, I believe. Peter, if I'm wrong, tell me, but join us now, and tell us what you are able to report tonight from your location.

PETER VILES, CNN FINANCIAL NEWS: And you are correct, Aaron. We're in Queens, just across the river.

What you would see on a normal night behind me is the United Nations and the Empire State Building. Just to follow up on what you said about communications, a transistor radio became very valuable in the city of New York this afternoon. As you would see them on the streets, you would see people would gather around the transistor, what we are hearing.

But this has got to be the longest and slowest rush hour in the history of New York City, and it continues. I talked to one guy who had been walking for two and a half hours just to get to the 59th Street Bridge to get into Queens, where I am now. He figured he had another two and a half hours walking to go to get home. That guy is probably getting home about now, five hours after he left Wall Street.

But this is one of those nights. Everyone in New York is going to have a story, and a lot of the stories are, how did you get home? Let's hear a couple of those stories.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

VILES: So it was like a sea of humanity.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It was, it was. Although this time, it was a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) that the sea of humanity wasn't freaked out. They were just calmly walking across the bridge, and they were in a much better mood than they were two years ago.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Being here during 9/11 and today, I think New York shows its best spirit during crisis. You see people just pull together and do what needs to be done, and you see funny sights of people just waiting it out and doing what they have to do. And, you know, we are here just relaxing, because, you know, there's nothing else to do this evening.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

VILES: You know, you do hear that there is something of a festive atmosphere, we've heard it from Wolf and from Anderson. But there is another side to this. There is a human toll here. When we got across the bridge from New York, it was a hot day today, a number of elderly women came up to us and asked us, how could they get home? They had miles to go, miles they had never walked. They take the bus. The buses are not running.

So there was a fair amount of confusion. There is calm in the city, but I would say there's an edge to it tonight, Aaron. And now that we may know that this is not terrorism, still, when will the power come on? The lights behind me are not power returning. Those are generators, Aaron.

BROWN: Well, well, and I guess, as most people know, this is not New York, it's not a city of single-family houses by and large. You've got apartment building, six stories, 10 stories, 20 stories. Those apartments are very, very warm tonight.

Hospitals, by and large, were able to stay in business, with generators. Up at Harlem, we know they were quite busy. They had a lot of heat-related and anxiety-related problems to deal with.

But in terms of large-scale problems, mostly things have gone pretty well. New Yorkers have a great -- as a transplanted New Yorker, New Yorkers have a great, What can you do about it? quality to them. They, they -- we, we tend to roll with the punches here pretty well. There were a lot of punches thrown at the city on a hot summer day, and in other cities too today, and the city seems to be rolling with them.

Detroit was another city that was hit by all of this. We haven't had as much reporting out of these other cities for sort of obvious reasons. It's hard to communicate in a situation where you are talking about the lack of electricity.

Eric Leaf is with WJBJ in Detroit. I hope I got that right. VBG in Detroit. And he joins us now to give us an update on what things are like there -- Eric.

ERIC LEAF, REPORTER, WVBJ, DETROIT: Good evening, Aaron.

Two-point-one million metro Detroiters have been without power roughly since 4:00 this afternoon, and we have to say, for the most part, things have gone very well, for all things considered, with power being out in such an expansive area.

People have pretty much gone about their business. Obviously surprised and some shock when the power went out, much like in the other cities across the United States, but everyone pretty much behaving themselves. We've had no major incidents to report.

There have been a couple of fires, which the fire department has been able to get under control.

We have some video to show you that taken just a short while ago. What you -- (audio interrupt) ... or you would find much activity in the nighttime anyway in the downtown area, unless there was a professional sporting event, a baseball game going on, or such.

And tonight, really, especially so, you will find that the downtown is very quiet. Very little foot traffic. Very little automobile traffic. And what traffic there is, we're happy to report, people are adhering to the rules of the road. Of course, the traffic lights are out, so people are having to go simply on the honor system, and so far they have done that.

The mayor of the city, Kwame Kilpatrick (ph), has been commending his citizens all night for essentially doing the right thing, and also looking out after their neighbors, and trying to really care for the elderly, and those people with special needs.

We can report that the area hospitals, and there are two level- one trauma centers in metro Detroit, total, only one in the city proper, and we're told that all the hospitals are doing quite well, as better to be expected actually.

Right now the hospitals are open, and they are operating under pretty much normal conditions, dealing with traumas, and they are even conducting emergency surgeries. But when you move outside the emergency rooms, they have all about ceased any other kind of activity. Operations for tonight and tomorrow are probably going to be called off.

As far as when the power will come back on in metro Detroit, for the 2.1 million customers anxiously awaiting for that to happen, there was a press conference here at the power company, DTE Energy, about a half hour or so ago, and they told us that it's going to be several days.

At first, they were hoping that maybe sporadically power would come on in pockets of metro Detroit by tonight, but simply that was just perhaps a little bit too ambitious, and perhaps a little naive.

They are now saying that it could be days before the power comes back on.

One thing that is a little discouraging that we have to report in the Detroit area, there have been a couple of isolated reports of price gouging. We had a report from one of our viewers tell us that at a convenience store, someone was selling a case of bottled water for $175. We had the state attorney general on our air earlier this evening, and of course he said that he would aggressively pursue these people who are taking advantage of people in these times.

So that's pretty much the situation in Detroit, without power. But doing the best to sort of get by.

In Detroit, I am Eric Leaf for CNN. Aaron, back to you. BROWN: Eric, this -- One quick question. This will help me get a sense of how big a crisis we have. Are the casinos in Detroit open or closed tonight?

LEAF: No, everything essentially in the downtown area is closed.

BROWN: OK.

LEAF: And the power company telling us that downtown Detroit will be without power tomorrow. So they've actually asked that people take the day off tomorrow and consider this a three-day weekend.

BROWN: OK, Eric, nicely done. Eric Leaf, who is in Detroit. Two million people in Detroit without power, and stories like those being told tonight in Cleveland and Toronto and parts of New Jersey. And, of course, here in New York.

Our coverage continues after this short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, I suspect had it not been for our lead story tonight would have been the capture of an important al Qaeda operative in southeast Asia. It is a reminder there was other news going on today that would have been reported had it not been, but it was.

Fredricka Whitfield is in Atlanta with a quick overview of some of the other events of the day -- Fredricka.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, Aaron.

Here are some of the other stories we're following for you this evening.

Law enforcement sources say a senior al Qaeda leader known as Hambali has been arrested in Thailand. He's accused of planning last week's explosion at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, last year's nightclub bombings in Bali, and possibly the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.

The U.N. Security Council is still waiting for Libya to deliver a promised letter accepting financial responsibility for the 1989 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. U.S. officials claim France is holding up the settlement because it's trying to get similar compensation for the 1989 bombing of a French airliner.

Meantime, French health officials say as many as 3,000 French citizens have died in the heat wave there. Critics say the French government has done a poor job of managing the crisis.

Now we're going to go back to our continuing coverage of the blackout. Let's go back to Aaron.

BROWN: Fredricka, thank you very much.

Josie Burke is up in Lewiston, New York, right, Lewiston, New York, which is essentially at Niagara Falls, which, when we sort this all out, it may or may not turn out to be ground zero in this. But it is certainly in the early reporting a sense that this -- that this part of the Mohawk power grid is what started it all. And Josie has been doing some reporting up there. Josie, good evening.

JOSIE BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good evening, Aaron.

We're about four miles north of Niagara Falls here, and I'm standing outside the New York State Power Authority. And there were a lot of rumors swirling this evening that perhaps a lightning strike here actually caused the power outage throughout the East Coast.

And I'm joined now by Joanne Willmott, who is the regional director of community relations for the New York State Power Authority.

And first, Joanne, we have heard it shot down before, but maybe you can do it again one time with a little finality. No lightning strike?

JOANNE WILLMOTT, REGIONAL MANAGER, COMMUNITY RELATIONS, NEW YORK STATE POWER AUTHORITY: No lightning strike. We're still not sure what caused this widespread power outage, but we do know for a certainty that it was not the result of a lightning strike here at the Niagara project.

BURKE: Can you go into any details about what can be done from this particular place to try to determine just what happened?

WILLMOTT: Well, the power project here at Niagara, as well as our other large hydro project in northern New York, have continued to operate throughout this situation.

So we're working along with the other utilities and the New York State Independent System Operator, who oversees and coordinates all the generation. We're working to get New York State back online. Our units are generating. The state is slowly coming back, and areas are being restored to power.

So it will be some time, though, before we're probably able to determine what caused this outage.

BURKE: Did you see any sort of slowdown? Any sort of brownout, anything out of the norm here? Or everything was business as usual, while the rest of this part of the country was suffering a blackout?

WILLMOTT: We did experience here at the project kind of a dip in generation around 4:00, 4:10 this afternoon, which is when this all started. However, we recovered very quickly. Our units came back up into service. And again, we've been generating power. So right now, we're producing about 2,400 megawatts of electricity.

BURKE: And can you just explain for the person sitting at home, who doesn't necessarily understand everything that goes into generating power, just what is done here? And how a vital this particular power authority is to producing power everywhere? WILLMOTT: Sure. We use water from the Niagara River here to generate electricity at the Niagara project. This is the largest generating station in New York State, and actually one of the largest in the country. On any given day, we generate about 10 percent of this state's electricity. So it's a vital resource for New York State and certainly for the region as a whole.

BURKE: So is the question that you're trying to figure out, the one that comes to mind, if you never really lost power here, and you are supplying most of the power to the state, how did most of state lose power?

WILLMOTT: Well, again, we provide maybe 10 percent at any given time of this state's energy. But again, we're just part of the overall picture. We're all interconnected to other utilities and other transmission systems, and a failure at one place can, you know, cause a system-wide problem like we're experiencing tonight.

But again, we'll be working with the other utilities and the New York ISO to restore this state, and then to certainly determine what in fact may have caused this.

BURKE: And is there anything at all you can tell us? Any indications at this point in time, from your vantage point, about what might have caused this?

WILLMOTT: We don't know, and that's puzzling, obviously, and we'll be working again to make that determination.

BURKE: Joanne, thank you very much for your time tonight. Obviously, a very busy time here.

Aaron, I know you have been getting some anecdotal evidence from people out in the field this evening. We drove in from Rochester, took about an hour and a half this evening, and while we could look around from the highway, left and right, saw some power outage, the toll booths along the New York State Thruway, and they're working, full working order, you still have to pay. Back to you.

BROWN: Well, of course! I get that. Josie, you were up, you were on your way, I guess, to cover the PGA up in Rochester. And you got sidetracked a bit. Thank you very much for your work tonight. Josie Burke.

BURKE: Thanks, Aaron.

BROWN: Let me just show you briefly a part of New York, a part of New York that many of you are familiar with, but it will look quite different to you. This is Times Square tonight in the heart of Manhattan.

On any normal night -- goodness, on any normal day -- there is more light and more electric usage in Times Square than almost anywhere else in the United States.

But not tonight. All of those giant TV screens, all of those news tickers on all of those broadcast facilities that docked Times Square are dark tonight. All of those restaurants that serve the large theater complexes that exist around Broadway and not just a bit off of Times Square dark tonight.

Times Square, this great central gathering place in the center of Manhattan, is dark tonight. But it doesn't mean that people aren't there. Lots of people have gone down because, honestly, even on a good night, New Yorkers don't hang around the house that much. It's -- apartments are small, and unless you have got good air conditioning, they can be a bit warm.

So it's a place where people do come out and mingle on the streets. They would rather, I assume, be sitting in a restaurant tonight than hanging out in Times Square, but that's where they are tonight. But there's no light there for them. There's no light at all.

Jim Gilmore is the former governor of Virginia, and he joins us from Washington tonight. He's been thinking about and working on the homeland security aspect of this crisis.

I think crisis is a fair word, isn't it, governor?

JIM GILMORE, NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORISM: Well, certainly has been an incident. I think that a crisis, of course, sometime in the future, could be a great deal worse if it's a deliberative attack, if there are mass casualties.

We haven't seen that tonight. But we have seen a reaction to a situation that I think has been a good one. There's been good communication between federal, state, and local authorities. Local responders were prepared. There was no sense of panic or anxiety.

Things can get worse, and there needs to be more preparation and more work, but certainly the private sector has a lot to be proud of tonight as they have begun to restore power in this reasonable way.

BROWN: Let me work out a couple of those things, if I may. You talked about communications. Can you give me an example of what you mean, the communications worked?

GILMORE: Well, I mean that the Department of Homeland Security was in touch with the affected governors, and then also with local elected officials, Mayor Bloomberg, of course, was very much apparent and in charge of the situation in New York City. And I think there was good communication back and forth between officials, elected officials, and the private sector.

But there is still, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), there's still, Aaron, a lot work to be done. We still have to be thinking how we get the private sector fully engaged in the national program to protect the critical infrastructure.

Because we have to remember, tonight it was an electrical power grid, and it wasn't any kind of attack, but it could be anything. It could be nuclear plants, could be chemical plants. It could be any number of other types of critical infrastructures.

And we have to be thinking about this and be vigilant, but not at the same time overreact. And certainly tonight we did not see any overreaction anywhere in the affected area.

BROWN: Is this -- You know, we -- In the last couple of years, governor, all of us, you, those of us in the news business, and, I think, people watching these newscasts, have all thought a lot about the vulnerabilities of the infrastructure.

I don't know that many of us thought about the electric grids so much as maybe we thought about a nuclear power plant here or there. Does it surprise you, you were governor of a state, privy to a lot of stuff, does it surprise you that what we were dealing with was a massive failure of the grid?

GILMORE: Well, in fact, I was governor of one of the two states that were directly attacked at the 9/11 attack, New York and Virginia, with the Pentagon, and in northern Virginia. And, you know, it, of course, while this is surprising, I think that it gives us an opportunity to go in there and look and see exactly what did occur.

What is the nature of this? First, you see, we saw tonight a spike-up. Because there's always this sense that if anything dramatic happens in the United States, oh, my gosh, now it's a terrorist attack. And so that's our first reaction.

And now we're sort in a relief mode. Oh, gosh, we can be festive and relaxed, because it really wasn't a terrorist attack. And the private sector's going to work to put things back in shape. The elected officials are in shape.

Now, I think we've got to go to work and find out what happened here. Why did this happen? And how come there really weren't firewalls or redundancies or ways of circumscribing this type of situation before it spread over so much of the part of the United States that it did?

And then you have to take those lessons and apply it to other parts of the critical infrastructure as well.

And we're in the process of doing that, I know. Much has already been done. And I think that's been demonstrated by the reaction tonight. But we still have a great deal more to do, Aaron.

BROWN: Governor, it's good to talk to you again. I think there will be lots of interesting questions asked about the role both of the private sector, in terms of the electric grid, and the government, and how they relate, and how much regulation is enough, and how much is too much, and whether there's too much, or not enough. I think those are questions for the day ahead. Thank you very much.

I think the question that New Yorkers have, and certainly the question everyone who's living through this in various parts of country has, when the power's coming back on. Maria Hinojosa joins us again from Con Edison, the major New York utility. And I believe, I suspect, looking at some of the information that's gone on the screen, that she can give us an update on when power may be coming back, at least in the New York area -- Maria.

MARIA HINOJOSA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on phone): Aaron, some very good news that we just heard from one of the spokespeople here at Con Edison. They are telling us that major metropolitan New York will have power back by 1:00 a.m. this morning, and the areas around the grid, they said, should have power sometime -- (audio interrupt) ... something more definitive than what we had just heard before, where they were saying that they were not going to be able to give us any kind of determination about when power would be back.

But just a few minutes ago, we have heard that they are now telling us that major metropolitan New York should have power back by 1:00 a.m., and the areas around the grid of New York, around 8:00 a.m.

Something else, Aaron, about two minutes ago, when we were sitting in the car waiting to report this, suddenly we saw lots of lights flashing outside of our car. Of course, the question was, where is the light coming from? Several police cars pulled up. We turned around. And Mayor Bloomberg just walked out and made his way up to the -- probably the 16th floor of the Con Ed headquarters here on 15th street and Irving Plaza.

He did not give any comment. He said he would talk to us when he comes out. But the New Yorkers who saw him immediately started yelling at him, "Mr. Mayor, turn the lights back on!" And he smiled and went into the building.

So we will have an update on what Mayor Bloomberg has to say within a few moments' time, Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Maria, help me understand one quick thing, and I need you to be fairly brief here. We -- for New Yorkers who are listening, I am not quite sure how they are listening, when you talk about metro New York, are you just talking about the five boroughs of New York? Or are you talking about Long Island, are you talking about Westchester? What do we mean by metro New York?

HINOJOSA: It appears that they're talking about just the five major boroughs, Aaron. We had heard reports earlier this evening that they had restored power in some sectors of the South Bronx, Throgs Neck, and Westchester.

But right now, what it appears they are saying is that metropolitan New York, that would be the five boroughs -- and we'll try to get confirmation, Aaron, whether or not that means it will extend any further.

But they did want to get -- tell us that at least by 1:00 a.m., their words, major metropolitan New York will have power back by 1:00 a.m., and the areas around that, that might be the more extensive metropolitan area, not until 8:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, Aaron.

BROWN: OK. Maria, thank you very much. We'll sort out what precisely metro New York means and more.

We will take a break. Our coverage of this extraordinary day and night continues on CNN.

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