Lesson learned from 2003 blackout

It was a day many of us won't soon forget.

Tuesday marked the 15th anniversary of the Northeast blackout.

The widespread outage knocked out power in Ontario, as well as parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States.

It happened shortly after 4 p.m. on August 14, 2003, and put some 50 million people in the dark.

It was later determined the primary cause was a software glitch in an alarm system in a control room at a utility in Ohio. Operators weren't alerted to re-distribute load after overloaded hydro wires came into contact with a tree.

The vice-president of operations at Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro says if anything, the blackout taught us to be better prepared.

“Certainly the readiness factor is more pronounced now than it was back then,” Wilf Meston told KitchenerToday.

“Provincially, and probably even a little locally, everybody had got complacent. We didn't think that type of thing could ever happen again, but it did. Since then, I know there's been on-going with our regulator, emergency exercises to be able to handle this type of situation should it come up again.” Meston added.

He says there are also new standards in terms of reliability, and maintaining your plant, which all the transmitters and generators have to adhere to.

The hydro suppliers also regularly review their emergency preparedness plans and test their systems.

During the 2003 blackout, Meston believes they were able to get power back to most of their customers by the next morning.

“Now I do recall that we did get into rotating blackouts that day…while people may have been on there still wasn't enough generation to feed all the load in the province. We were having people on for an hour at a time, and then turning them off again, and putting another area of town back on. My recollection is that continued on for most of that second day, and may be even a little bit into the third day.” he added.