Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Live Saturday
Eerie Loop Blamed For Outages
Aired August 16, 2003 - 14:01 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.
CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: Hi every, I'm Christi Paul at CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta. Welcome to CNN Live Saturday. We are glad to have you with us, we begin with the blackout. Investigators are still searching for the definitive cause of that outage, but the head of north American electricity reliability council now says it appears the blackout was caused by three failed transmission line in Ohio.
Meanwhile engineers have managed to get the lights back on for most of the affected that is the good news. In Cleveland the electricity pumps sending water to the city's residents are operating. In Detroit the power is on, but officials asking people to use it sparingly.
And in New York you can now catch a subway or take a train to Long Island. And with us live in New York at Times Square is Kathleen Koch. Kathleen how are you doing and are things completely back to normal for the folks there yet?
KOCH: You know, we drove in here last night from Washington, D.C. my producer and I. And at that point everything appeared to be certainly back to normal. And as of this morning the one glitch still holding out in the big apple was the subway system. The subway cars got running, and so really, when you look around the city right now, you see people going to lunch, shopping, people out going to Broadway shows, as if none of this ever happened.
Clearly, though, a lot of people suffered a great deal during the huge blackout Thursday night into Friday. And they are picking up the pieces right now. And the federal government is doing its part now, getting together with the Canadians. They formed a task force to figure out what happened.
The energy secretary, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met this afternoon with the governors of New York state and New Jersey. He had a press conference a few minutes ago and talked about a number of things, about the fact that he is going to meet on Wednesday with his Canadian counter part in Detroit, the Canadian minister to start this intensive investigation. Get the task force rolling.
He talked about the fact that there would be continuing rolling blackouts because they are trying to be very careful as they bring everything back up on-line, because the system is still very fragile. So they may have to from time to time from one area to the other, take the power down. Only if the demand, exceeds the supply. Also speaking at the press conference was the New York governor who said it's important for the citizen of every state in the region to cooperate now and save energy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SPENCER ABRAHAM, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY SECRETARY: President Bush and Prime Minister Chris Yen spoke, they have designated my counter partner Valley Wall and I to jointly head as an international task force that will have the responsibility the full and comprehensive investigation of the reasons for the outages, the reasons that the problem cascaded, as well as recommendation as to how to make sure it does not happen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KOCH: Obviously that was the energy secretary and not Governor Pataki, but Governor Pataki was speaking out, we are hearing that from a lot of governors right now through out the affected regions urging citizens to do their best to conserve energy. And again as you said, they are tracing all this back to Ohio. We had initial reports yesterday that there was one transmission line they traded it back to.
And now apparently there may be several, and part of this loop, something called the Eerie loop, a big loop of transmission lines that runs all the way around Lake Eerie, around Lake Ontario and on up into Canada and back into the U.S. and so it was after these lines started going down around 3:00 on Thursday apparently about an hour later, there was a big fluctuation on the loop and the power surged and started running in the opposite direction, and they say that's what triggered this whole collapse.
But we will be getting more details as time goes on. The federal government, state governments are looking for answers. They want to reassure citizens. As Abraham said, you can't reassure them until we find out just what happened. Back to you.
PAUL: All right, Kathleen Koch, live in New York, thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired August 16, 2003 - 14:01 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CHRISTI PAUL, CNN ANCHOR: Hi every, I'm Christi Paul at CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta. Welcome to CNN Live Saturday. We are glad to have you with us, we begin with the blackout. Investigators are still searching for the definitive cause of that outage, but the head of north American electricity reliability council now says it appears the blackout was caused by three failed transmission line in Ohio.
Meanwhile engineers have managed to get the lights back on for most of the affected that is the good news. In Cleveland the electricity pumps sending water to the city's residents are operating. In Detroit the power is on, but officials asking people to use it sparingly.
And in New York you can now catch a subway or take a train to Long Island. And with us live in New York at Times Square is Kathleen Koch. Kathleen how are you doing and are things completely back to normal for the folks there yet?
KOCH: You know, we drove in here last night from Washington, D.C. my producer and I. And at that point everything appeared to be certainly back to normal. And as of this morning the one glitch still holding out in the big apple was the subway system. The subway cars got running, and so really, when you look around the city right now, you see people going to lunch, shopping, people out going to Broadway shows, as if none of this ever happened.
Clearly, though, a lot of people suffered a great deal during the huge blackout Thursday night into Friday. And they are picking up the pieces right now. And the federal government is doing its part now, getting together with the Canadians. They formed a task force to figure out what happened.
The energy secretary, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met this afternoon with the governors of New York state and New Jersey. He had a press conference a few minutes ago and talked about a number of things, about the fact that he is going to meet on Wednesday with his Canadian counter part in Detroit, the Canadian minister to start this intensive investigation. Get the task force rolling.
He talked about the fact that there would be continuing rolling blackouts because they are trying to be very careful as they bring everything back up on-line, because the system is still very fragile. So they may have to from time to time from one area to the other, take the power down. Only if the demand, exceeds the supply. Also speaking at the press conference was the New York governor who said it's important for the citizen of every state in the region to cooperate now and save energy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SPENCER ABRAHAM, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY SECRETARY: President Bush and Prime Minister Chris Yen spoke, they have designated my counter partner Valley Wall and I to jointly head as an international task force that will have the responsibility the full and comprehensive investigation of the reasons for the outages, the reasons that the problem cascaded, as well as recommendation as to how to make sure it does not happen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KOCH: Obviously that was the energy secretary and not Governor Pataki, but Governor Pataki was speaking out, we are hearing that from a lot of governors right now through out the affected regions urging citizens to do their best to conserve energy. And again as you said, they are tracing all this back to Ohio. We had initial reports yesterday that there was one transmission line they traded it back to.
And now apparently there may be several, and part of this loop, something called the Eerie loop, a big loop of transmission lines that runs all the way around Lake Eerie, around Lake Ontario and on up into Canada and back into the U.S. and so it was after these lines started going down around 3:00 on Thursday apparently about an hour later, there was a big fluctuation on the loop and the power surged and started running in the opposite direction, and they say that's what triggered this whole collapse.
But we will be getting more details as time goes on. The federal government, state governments are looking for answers. They want to reassure citizens. As Abraham said, you can't reassure them until we find out just what happened. Back to you.
PAUL: All right, Kathleen Koch, live in New York, thank you so much.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
