The Energy Department recently announced investigators will hold three public meetings in December to discuss the power blackout in August that spanned eight U.S states and part of Canada, and left 50 million people in the dark. The meetings are scheduled for Dec. 4 in Cleveland, Dec. 5 in New York, and Dec. 8 in Toronto.
In addition, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will meet today at its headquarters to take public comment on a report investigators released last week. The report largely blames the outage on the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp., saying in addition to failing to keep trees trimmed, it didn’t have adequate alarms or computer equipment to flag the growing drain on its grid. The report claims the outage was largely preventable. The meeting will also focus on how the agency can promote grid reliability standards.
