Life gets back to normal after Northeast blackout

Aside the garbage cans overflowing with spoiled food, the water-boil warnings and the flood of questions about how transmission problems ended up leaving 50 million people in the dark, life in the Northeast was close to normal two days after a historically bad blackout.

The probe into how the eight-state, two-nation blackout began centered on an area just south of Cleveland, where a leading investigator said three transmission lines failed just before the massive outage.

Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, suggested human error might have been the reason the problems were not isolated before they knocked out power from Michigan to New Jersey to the Canadian province of Ontario.

"The system has been designed and rules have been created to prevent this escalation and cascading. It should have stopped," Gent said in a telephone conference call.

Gent investigators were examining more than 10,000 pages of data, including automatically generated logs on power flows over transmission lines, to determine what caused the blackout.

FirstEnergy Corp, the Akron, Ohio-based utility that officials said owned at least two of the three lines, said alarm systems that might have alerted engineers to the failed lines were broken, but that functioning backup systems had been in place.

Nearly of the millions affected by the blackout had power restored by Saturday, but people were still being urged to conserve electricity and many remained harried by aftereffects.

Water in parts of Michigan, Ohio and Ontario remained under warnings to boil water before drinking or cooking with it because water systems shut down by the outage were still being checked out.

Macomb County, Michigan, ordered restaurants to shut down -- although that was news to Ali Harajli and the crowds gobbling up shish kabob and shawarma at his St. Clair Shores eatery.

"They have a point, and they have a right to do that," said Harajli, who had pots of boiling water ready for kitchen use. "Other restaurants in town probably don't take the same steps that we do."

In Manhattan's Midtown, hundreds wandered about Saturday on a sticky summer day at a street fair -- a typical, and welcome, scene after two days without power.