Probe into Downtown Chicago Blackout

C H I C A G O, Oct. 9 -- A massive downtown power outage caught Commonwealth Edison by surprise, after a relatively uneventful year in which the company could spend up to $1.9 billion upgrading its system.

The utility was left searching for reasons why a new circuitbreaker — put in place specifically to head off major outages — caught fire and exploded Sunday, plunging 12,000 customers intodarkness.

“The equipment we installed should have isolated this outage,but it did not,” said Pam Strobel, a ComEd executive vicepresident. “There are new controls that should have preventedthis.”

The fact that the explosion is unrelated to widespread outagesin the summer of 1999 is of little comfort to state regulators.

“This may be a huge anomaly or freak event — we don’t knowthat,” Illinois Commerce Commission spokesman David Farrell said.“But a large, sophisticated urban utility builds in many kinds ofbackup, redundant systems to take care of anything that mightoccur.”

The ICC has been meeting with ComEd regularly since the 1999outages, which prompted Mayor Richard Daley to fly into a rage anda top ComEd official to resign.

“We are very deeply concerned because of the many, many, manyhours of meetings with the company and the commitment toreliability that was made public by the company — and made over andover again,” Farrell said. “As a significant, major city in theworld, one of the fundamentals of a sophisticated, modern city issafe, reliable power.”

City officials also voiced impatience as transportation andpolice departments once again declared an emergency and went intoaction.

William Abolt, the city’s environment commissioner who hasblasted the utility for past outages, said the city would againdemand answers.

“This really underscores the need for this company toaggressively complete the process of updating and transforming thecurrent system so that power outages like this don’t happen,” hesaid.