A power outage hit cities spreading from New York to Cleveland and Detroit Thursday afternoon. Widespread power outages were reported in Boston, Detroit, Toronto and throughout Ontario. In northern Ohio, businesses and residents are reporting power outages from Toledo to Cleveland. Portions of Connecticut, including Hartford, also have experienced power losses.
Officials said the outage is a natural occurrence and not related to terrorism, but officer should remember that terrorists are opportunistic and to be on the alert.
Power began to flicker on late Thursday evening, hours after a major power outage struck simultaneously across dozens of cities in the eastern United States and Canada.
By 11 p.m. in New Jersey, power had been restored to all but 250,000 of the nearly 1 million customers who had been in the dark since just after 4 p.m., a spokeswoman for Public Service Energy and Gas said.
In New York City, however, Con Edison backed off previous predictions that power for most of the metropolitan area would be restored by 1 a.m. Friday. The power company had predicted that residents closer to Niagara Falls in upstate New York would have to wait until 8 a.m.
The outage occurred quickly and rippled across a large area. Cities affected included New York, Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Toronto and Ottawa, Canada.
In just three minutes, starting at 4:10 p.m., 21 power plants shut down, according to Genscape, a company that monitors the output of power plants.
It was unclear what caused the outage, although state and federal officials agreed that it was not terrorism.
One possibility was a lightning strike in the Niagara region on the U.S. side of the border, according to the Canadian Department of National Defense. A spokeswoman for the Niagara-Mohawk power grid said the cause was still unknown, but that it was not a lightning strike.