New York, Aug 16: As power was fully restored to New York city the United States and Canada sought the causes of the worst blackout in north American history and ways to prevent a repeat of outages that plunged as many as 50 million people into darkness. As New York's main power company announced the city had electricity again -- nearly 29 hours after the lights went out -- the White House said US and Canadian officials would set up a cross-border task force on the crisis.
''We need to take a look at what went wrong, analyze the problem and come up with a solution. We don't know yet what went wrong but we will,'' US President George W Bush said during a visit to California yesterday.
''I view it as a wake-up call,'' Bush told reporters, describing the blackout as ''an indication we need to modernize the electricity grid".
Bush, who discussed the crisis for the first time with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said investigators must find out why the outages spread so quickly through much of the northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario, hitting New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, Toronto and a host of smaller cities.
Chretien had suggested earlier that the cause of the power collapse lay in the United States, but some US utility officials insisted the problem started in Canada.
As night fell across the Manhattan skyline yesterday, lights shone from the Empire State building, Times Square reclaimed its garish neon luster and Broadway theaters opened for a full schedule of performances. Bureau Report