FirstEnergy at the center of the blackout inquiry had previous outages

Associated Press
August 20, 2003

CLEVELAND -- The electric utility at the center of the blackout inquiry already faced official complaints for earlier power outages blamed on outdated equipment and trees too close to power lines...

Some experts said the trigger for last Thursday's blackout may stem from FirstEnergy's borrowing a large amount of power from other Midwest utilities. The system may have collapsed when a FirstEnergy generating plant and several power transmission lines failed, snuffing lights from Detroit to New York City to Canada, the experts said.

http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/state/hc-20214859.apds.m0035.bc-ct--blacaug20,0,2924858.story?coll=hc-headlines-local-wire

thanks for posting it nonetheless. This is a big story.

these republitards talk about how privatizing
and deregulating all the utilities is such a
great thing, and yet we still end up with the
blackout.

We get our power from the TVA, a GOVERNMENT run
utility, and their system runs fine, the only outages
we've had is from storms.

If the fans of de-reg and privatization were right
then you'd think TVA would be having blackouts
every week, since according to them the government
can't do anything right(except the military, who
is making the world a "safer" place for all the
corporate elites)

All the billions being wasted on the attempted
domination of Iraq by Commander Shrub could go
a long ways toward rebuilding our infrastructure
instead.

Apparently, employees of FirstEnergy were happy to donate to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign because of Bush's "pro-business" approach. For more information, see http://www.bright.net/~dknox/clips/bush.html .