New York subway resumes service after blackout

New York City's subway, stopped in its tracks by this week's historic power failure, resumed service today, and a US-Canadian…

New York City's subway, stopped in its tracks by this week's historic power failure, resumed service today, and a US-Canadian task force searched for the cause of the blackout.

The White House announced the cross-border task force on the crisis that plunged as many as 50 million people in the Northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario into darkness.

"We need to take a look at what went wrong, analyse 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.

"I view it as a wake-up call," the president told reporters, describing the worst blackout in North American history as "an indication we need to modernise the electricity grid."

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Mr Bush, who discussed the crisis for the first time with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said investigators must find out why outages spread so quickly to New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, Toronto and a host of smaller cities.

Mr 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.

In New York, subway trains halted for nearly 36 hours started running again early today. In a recorded announcement, the city's transit authority said all but two subway lines were operating.

Power returned to the city late last night, but transit crews needed time to test trains. New York City's subway and bus system carries about 7 million passengers on a normal weekday, making it the largest in the country.

Thousands of air travellers crowded into airport terminals in New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Toronto on Friday, but airlines had cancelled hundreds of flights.

Procedures put in place after a huge blackout in 1965 failed to isolate breakdowns to small areas of the country.

Former Energy Secretary Mr Bill Richardson said much of the US electricity system was 50 or 60 years old.

"We're a superpower with a third-world grid. We need a new grid," said Mr Richardson, now governor of New Mexico.