9200 Blackout 2003: A Lesson in Emergency Preparedness

About This Course

This course provides a summary review of the U.S. eastern area blackout that occurred on August 14, 2003. The learning objectives for this course are (a) to understand the root causes of this cascading occurrence; (b) to review the restoration techniques used during the event; and (c) to build emergency preparedness skill sets.

We have selected the East Coast Blackout of 2003 because of the depth of analysis that was performed following that event and the large body of lessons learned from that analysis. There is a wealth of additional information for many other power outages, including the following: the Northeast Blackout of 1965, which impacted the northeastern U.S. and Ontario, Canada; the September 12, 2005, blackout in Los Angeles, which affected millions of residents in California; and the February 2, 2011, outages at two major coal-fired power plants in Texas that resulted from a cold snap and forced rotating blackouts in the area. Indeed, each year there are dozens of major power outages throughout the world; many are caused by weather or seismic events, but others are the result of avoidable circumstances.

All grid disturbances are reviewed so that we can learn from each event and enhance our emergency preparedness. It is important to learn from the past, but it is also important to recognize the great value and daily contributions of our grid operations personnel.

At the end of this training module there will be a completion exercise to measure the effectiveness of this module and to give you an opportunity to evaluate this module.

NERC CEH: 2, OPS Topics 2, NERC Standards 0, Simulation 1, EO Credit - No, PE Hours 2