SCADA/EMS Alarm System Failure Contributes to Blackout

Event Year: 2003 Reliability: Confirmed
Country: United States
Industry Type: Power and Utilities
Description:

According to the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force Report, a significant contributing factor to the August 14th blackout was the failure of the First Energy (FE) Energy Management System (EMS) Alarm system and the operators unawareness of this critical failure. The details from the report are as follows:

FE

Impact:

The August 14th, 2003 Northeast blackout (although is was only one of number of causes).