By John Funk and Sabrina Eaton
Plain Dealer Reporter

An explosion at a power plant in New york triggered blackouts in cities whose Power lines are linked by a nationwide system, known as a grid, that allows electricity to be sent from state to state.

Public Utilities Commission of Ohio spokesman matt Butler said an explosion at a plant operated by Consolidated Edison in New York knocked Out two 345 kilovolt transmission lines, and created a "ripple effect" that knocked out transmission lines in several states and Canada.

That triggered automatic shutdown of plants that feed into those transmission lines, including FirstEnergy Corps's Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The North American Electric Reliability Council, a not-for-profit electrical industry group, said Perry was

"From our point of view, every among ten nuclear plants thing is working 'as it should," knocked offline by the disruption, said PUCO's Butler. "The nuclear plant shut down. That's a failsafe in the systern."

FirstEnergy spokesman Ralph DiNicola said roughly a third of his company's three million customers in Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania lost power in the outage. FirstEnergy's Eastlake, Avon, Ashtabula, Bayshore and Burger coal-fired power plants were also turned off autOrliaticlally. He said it was too early to tally any damage the company's facilities may have sustained in the power surge.

Butler, said that customers of the Lorain Medina Rural Electric Cooperative also lost power. He said FirstEnergy was able to restore power to customers in Toledo by 5:30 p.m., and was hoping to restore service to customers in its central region, which includes Akron, soon after.

"The outage seems to be in corridors as opposed to a general outage," FirstEnergy Spokesman David Poeppelmeier said yesterday afternoon. 'We are trying to isolate the grid and get the power back up a corridor at a time."

After ensuring, its trarismission lines weren't damaged by the power surge, DiNicola said FirstEnergy began to restart the Eastlake and Perry plants at around 7:30 last night. Company engineers said it could take all night to restart all the companys plants.

"This has to be done in systematic way from the largest lines down, or we could sustain a lot of secondary damage that will extend the outage several days," DiNicola said.

He, said customers should turn Off major appliances, to prevent a spike in demand that could prompt more Outages when power is restored.