Update: VARs Wait To Evaluate IT Fallout From Power Outages

Late Thursday afternoon, the power outage swept across several North American cities, darkening New York City and its suburbs, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto, and Ottawa, where the problem apparently first surfaced.

New York Gov. George Pataki declared a state of emergency and said officials thought the cause of the blackout was "a possible transmission problem from Canada to the U.S." There was no sign of terrorism, officials in New York and Washington said.

Outages in the cities originally started at about 4pm EST; by 6pm EST power was being restored in some affected areas.

Mark Stellini, CEO of Wilmington, Del., solution provider InfoSystems, meanwhile, was preparing to provide disaster recovery solutions.

"I am sure this is going to affect customers," he said.

Unlike the September 11 tragedy, Stellini noted that the power outage has affected an entire region.

"September 11 was isolated," he said. "This is what will happen if someone takes out a major power grid. Many clients still have not implemented back-up and recovery solutions."

"I walk into law firms and they haven't got a good back-up for six weeks or two months or three months, and there is no backup strategy or plan," he added. "It is amazing and it happens a lot."

Prashanth Vemuganti is in a wait-and-see mode.

The president of Pantheon Solutions, an Iselin, N.J., VAR, has more than one dozen customers in New York City. But he can't get in touch with any of them given most phone services are out. Even if he could, though, it wouldn't do much good. "No one would probably want to hear from me right now because, since the subways are shut down, most people are on the street waiting for a bus or just trying to get out of the city."

But he is bracing for tomorrow morning to see what types of problems his customers might have suffered. "Tomorrow is a different day so we have to see if the businesses are coming back to life."

David Via, vice president of business development for Wolcott Systems Group, a Fairlawn, Ohio, solution provider, reported intermittent power disruptions and failed cell phone service. Fairlawn is about 25 minutes from Cleveland, where the power loss hit hard, shutting down Hopkins Airport. Via was preparing for a preventive shutdown of his own office systems.

The blackouts around the country rivaled those in the West on Aug. 11, 1996, when heat, sagging power lines and unusually high demand for electricity caused an outage that affected 4 million customers in nine states, one of the most severe outages in U.S. history.

A blackout in New York City in 1977 left some 9 million people without electricity for up to 25 hours. But this latest outage was most often compared with the great northeast blackout of 1965, which originated on the Niagara power grid -- apparently the source of this most recent problem.

"There is no evidence of any terrorism at this point," said Michael Sheehan, deputy commissioner for terrorism of New York City's Police Department. "We've talked to Washington and there are rumors, but none of them pans out."

JEFF O'HEIR, STEVEN BURKE, BARBARA DARROW, KRISTEN KENEDY AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.