November 20, 2003
Be glad FirstEnergy has no dinosaur DNA
If you're a fan of Michael Crichton novels, take a look at this New York Times report on the cascade of failures that caused the August blackout in North America. Failure to trim trees near power lines led to shutdowns, one company neglected to inform its neighbors of their downed lines, someone fixing a grid monitoring system left it off as he took a lunch break, etc. The chain of human errors reads like The Andromeda Strain.