OLEAN -- Pardon me if I remain skeptical about the adamant government denials concerning possible involvement of terrorists in last Thursday's power blackout.
While suspicious, conspiracy-minded folks like me have no hard evidence to show otherwise regarding terrorism, state, federal and Canadian officials -- including President George W. Bush -- sure did act passing strange in the hours after the lights went out.
Terrorists definitely were not involved, they said immediately. Too immediately. Whenever a federal official flatly denies something scary within minutes of a calamity or disaster, you can bet your bottom dollar he is merely trying to soothe you and keep you from suspecting the worst. Feds hate to lose control. The truth usually causes them to lose control.
Same thing happened during the anthrax letter crisis in late 2001 -- a bunch of conflicting, confusing lies until the Centers for Disease Control took over and started putting out the truth. The feds never learn the truth is usually more calming to Americans than having your chain endlessly yanked by the government spinners, self-serving politicos and finger-pointing blame-layers in both business and bureaucracy.
On Thursday, we first heard the nation's hugest power outage -- costing billions, putting 50 million people in the dark in the United States and Canada, and stranding thousands in big cities like New York, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto -- was caused by a lightning strike in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Huh? Never mind that the Cataract City was having one of its clearest days all summer, not a thundercloud in the sky. Never mind that the U.S. National Lightning Detection Network in Tucson, Ariz. -- with extremely sophisticated instruments that measure and record every lightning bolt in the nation every second of the day -- showed the nearest lightning strikes in the minutes before, during and after the power failure were in Michigan and southern Pennsylvania, at least 150 miles away. Most of the lightning strikes east of the Mississippi that day were in North Carolina, which wasn't affected. There were no lightning strikes in the Niagara area in that time frame. Zip. Zero. Nada.
Even President Bush, when he finally made a televised statement in front of the traveling White House press corps during his fund-raising trip to California, mentioned this bogus Niagara Falls lightning strike specifically as the putative cause -- his eyes darting from reporter to reporter to see if they were buying it.
Locally, Channel 2 -- WGRZ in Buffalo -- did some good hustling research and reported this Arizona non-measurement. Associated Press sent a reporter to the New York Power Authority's Niagara Power Project, which also had no recording of the phantom lightning bolt on its sophisticated gauges -- and which was still producing power with the lights on, by the way. These humble efforts did no journalistic good. But by this time it was like putting toothpaste back into the tube. The Niagara Falls lightning strike as the cause was repeated by lazy newspersons all over the country for about 36 hours. It soon became clear the mysterious Niagara Falls lightning excuse -- as news at least -- originated in the office of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, where one of his flacks stated it as the absolute confirmed truth.
Now, if Channel 2 and AP can get it right, why can't the White House -- which has instant access in its situation room to the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and a host of other agencies which ought to know -- get it right, too? Are they all just standing around watching CNN, or more likely, Fox?
As soon as U.S. utility officials started to deny the occurrence of lightning, the Canadians unleashed a salvo of more errant blame for the blackout, including several fantasies emanating from the office of the Canadian defense ministry.
It was Niagara Mohawk, probably a fire in one of their generation facilities. Nope. Nothing there.
OK then, it was a fire in a non-existent Con Edison power plant in Western New York. Uh, sorry. Missed by several hundred miles.
Umm, OK then, it was a fire in a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania -- we're not quite sure which one. Nope, said a spokeswoman at the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (which, after Three Mile Island, knows a thing or two about nuclear power plant shutdowns) -- all five nukes in the Keystone State were up and running at 100 percent. "There's not even a trash can fire," Maria Smith told AP.
Since when did Canadian government officials become such officious jerks? Time was, while you sort of expected Washington and Albany to pull the wool over your eyes, you could pretty much trust statements coming out of Toronto or Ottawa.
Allow me to insert a geezer moment in here. Time was, also, when a government official on either side of the border made a statement that later proved obviously incorrect, blatantly ill-conceived, or just plain wrong, that official would be hounded in print and ridiculed for days in the newspapers. Sometimes it would end a career. Often, it wouldn't even get publicized because some conscientious journalist would check it out.
Today, the offending speculation is just slapped on the air or rushed into print. The blithe official making it goes unscathed. After all, the official has accomplished what was intended all along -- massive confusion to the public, as long as the crisis doesn't get blamed on us.
Another Canadian embarrassment was the serious looting in supposedly law-abiding Ottawa and Toronto following Thursday's power shutdown -- while New York City residents behaved themselves in contrast to their riotous behavior after a similar blackout in 1977.
When Bush went on television Thursday, about two hours after the blackout, he said that "the one thing I can say for certain" was this was not terrorism.
Richard Clarke -- President Clinton's plain-talking national security coordinator and counterterrorism chief -- was not so sure. He told ABC News the day after the blackout, "Anybody who says that they know what happened last night is lying. If it were a cyber-attack you wouldn't know right away. And you might never know."
Could terrorist computer hackers -- no matter from which country they were operating -- have dragged an entire power grid into the dark?
Again, conflicting views among the so-called experts. The Federation of American Scientists seems to believe it's unlikely because it would require too much insider information from the utilities.
The National Academy of Sciences, however, has repeatedly warned of possible "cyber-attacks" on the U.S. power grids.
When the feds simulated computer attacks on the nation's electric power grids in 1999, they came away alarmed because almost all of them were successful. About six months before Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI just managed to intercept a very sophisticated attack on Florida's power system from abroad.
The worst thing about this may be the educative value of last week's blackout for incipient terrorists.
The homeland security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations -- Jamie Metzl -- told The New York Times that terrorists might study this and think that "if this one node in the electrical system can take down the whole system, then there must be others."
At press time, the real trouble seemed to have been isolated in the United States all right, but not in the Niagara region or Pennsylvania.
The president of the North American Electric Reliability Council -- a man who spells his name Michehl Gent -- claimed his official investigation was showing something, as yet unidentified, went wrong in three transmission lines just south of Cleveland, Ohio. This spread oscillating waves of too much power and draw through Ohio and Michigan, then over much of the Eastern Seaboard.
The Council, put together after the great northeast blackout of 1965 from public and private elements of the various power grids in Canada, the United States and Mexico, thinks this devastating ripple effect -- which should have been isolated from the national grid by quick shutdown by the Ohio power company, FirstEnergy Corp. -- was instead allowed to spread throughout the entire region.
So, no matter the blackout's cause, here's a message for federal, state and provincial officials on each side of the St. Lawrence River: Stop throwing bull. Stop making things up.
When you don't know if terrorists were involved in an incident or not, just say so. We'll understand. Quit trying to assuage us like upset children. We handled ourselves in admirable fashion after Sept. 11 and we'll rise to the occasion again if we have to.
Tell us the truth. We'll respect you for it. Hell, we might even vote for you again -- but I doubt it.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | August 19 2003 |