US President George W. Bush last night called the worst blackout in North American history a "wake-up call" and said he would push to upgrade the nation's electricity grid to head off future breakdowns.
Mr Bush discussed the power crisis for the first time with Canadian Prime Minister Mr Jean Chretien, and the White House announced that the two countries would create a joint task force to determine the cause and come up with possible fixes.
White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan said Mr Bush supported specific steps to strengthen the nation's transmission grid, such as giving the federal government more authority to control power lines and remove transmission bottlenecks.
Mr Bush was briefed earlier in the day by Treasury Secretary Mr John Snow about how financial markets were holding up and the White House said Health and Human Services Secretary Mr Tommy Thompson was contacting hospitals to make sure they had the supplies they needed.
"I view it as a wake-up call," Mr Bush told reporters during a visit to the Santa Monica mountains, adding that the massive blackout was "an indication we need to modernize the electricity grid."
He called the current delivery system "old and antiquated."
Federal, state and local officials are trying to pinpoint the cause of the breakdown, but they said terrorism was not involved.
Mr Bush said investigators needed to find out why the outages cascaded so quickly through much of the northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario, knocking New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, Toronto and a host of smaller cities back into the pre-electric age.
"We've got to figure out how to make the electricity system have the redundancy necessary so that if there is an outage... it doesn't affect as many people," Mr Bush said.