vices also can provide priority access to electrical power for critical services such as health and safety (U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force, 2004a).
The electrical energy power outage that occurred in August 2003 was unprecedented in geographic scope and severity. Thus, the tools expected to be available to emergency management services (curtailing the use of electrical energy, assigning priority access to electrical energy for critical public services, and drawing electrical power from other geographic regions) were unavailable. These tools were unavailable because almost the entire northern part of the Eastern Interconnection was shut down - both generation and transmission (U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force, 2004a).
Emergency management services personnel are confronted with a two-faceted problem. The first facet of the problem involves a determination of what went wrong in the electrical energy blackout in August 2003. The second facet of the problem concerns the development of recommendations for actions to assure that the electrical
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