New York City, the U.S. Northeast and
Midwest and Canada began to regain power and commuters struggled
to get to work after the biggest electrical blackout in North
American history.
The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market said they
will open, as did Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Supply was restored after 12 hours in areas of New York, northern
Ohio, western Pennsylvania and Toronto.
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The power loss blacked out millions of homes and businesses
in the biggest test of Wall Street’s backup systems since the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The reason for the outage was
unclear. President George W. Bush ruled out terrorism.
“All of our systems are operational and we fully expect to be
open for business,” said Raymond O’Rourke, a spokesman for New
York-based Morgan Stanley, the world’s second-biggest securities
firm by capital.
The blackout hit shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday, causing the
loss of 61,000 megawatts of power, more than twice that of any
previous North American outage, according to the North American
Electric Reliability Council. That’s enough for 49 million
households, making it bigger than the November 1965 blackout in
the eastern United States that affected 30 million, the biggest previous
outage in terms of customers.
The situation in New York City is “as good as we could hope
for,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in an interview. Bloomberg was
scheduled to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
“I walked onto the trading floor at 6 a.m. and about seven
traders were sleeping under their desks,” said Geoff Sherry, a
corporate bond trader at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in New York.
“The atmosphere is actually positive, everybody is trying to
make the best of it.”
Sherry estimated that about 40 percent of staff had turned up
to work at the New York trading floor.
Power was fully restored to the New York City borough of Staten Island and parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Consolidated
Edison Inc. spokeswoman Joy Faber said.
Parts of Brooklyn, southeast Bronx, Long Island City and
Westchester County also regained power. Niagara Mohawk Power Co.
resumed supply in upstate New York. All but about 15,000 customers
in New Jersey had electricity, down from more than 1 million who
lost it yesterday, Gov. James McGreevey said on WNYC radio.
New York Gov. George Pataki and Niagara Mohawk Power, a
unit of Niagara Mohawk Holdings Inc. that serves the Niagara Falls
area, said the cause hasn’t been determined.
The New York Stock Exchange was planning to open at the
normal time, said Ray Pellecchia, a spokesman. U.S. financial
markets and the government agencies that oversee them operated
with minimal disruption following the failure.
Bloomberg News
