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Canada and U.S. blame each other
TORONTO, Canada (AP) -- Canadian officials insisted a massive power cut across the northeast United States and parts of Canada originated in America -- but U.S. power workers blamed Canada. In the hours of confusion after Thursday's outage -- the biggest in U.S. history -- Canada's government offered conflicting explanations for the blackout, blaming it first on lightning in Niagara, then a fire at a Niagara plant, and next a fire at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant. Canada's defense minister, John McCallum, later backed off some of those theories, though remained firm that the source of the problem was in the U.S. section of the intricate power grid shared by the northeastern United States and Ontario. "The source is an outage in a northeastern United States power plant," said McCallum's spokesman Shane Diaczuk. In the U.S., officials were looking at a power transmission problem from Canada as the most likely cause of the outage, said a spokeswoman for New York Gov. George Pataki. There was no sign of terrorism, officials in New York and Washington agreed. The changing theories started several hours after the power went out at about 4:15 p.m. EDT (2015 GMT). Jim Munson, a spokesman for Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said: "We have been informed that lightning struck a power plant in the Niagara region on the U.S. side." The premier's office later said a fire at the Niagara plant in New York caused the blackout, while the defense minister said the fire was at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant. "That is absolutely not true," said Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Maria Smith. "It's bizarre. We have a direct line to each of our five (nuclear) power plants and they are all running at 100 percent." Brian Warner of the New York Power Authority said he was not sure where the power failure originated, but said the Niagara plant never stopped operating and wasn't struck by lightning. In one of the largest previous blackouts, in 1965, the blame fell on the Canadian side. That blackout struck the northeast and parts of Canada, leaving 30 million people in the dark. Investigators said it was caused by a faulty relay at a station in Ontario that caused a key transmission line to disconnect, according to the Blackout History Project, a Web site published by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In his comments Thursday, the Canadian defense minister did not name the plant in Pennsylvania where he believed there was a fire or give further details.
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