TORONTO (Aug. 15, 2003) — One minute it was a typical Thursday afternoon. Businesses were selling, shoppers buying, trucks rolling to their next drop site. But in a blink of an eye, at 4:11 p.m., an estimated 50 million people in Southern Ontario and parts of the U.S. — at one point as south as Virginia and west as Ohio — were robbed of all power as a massive blackout spread within minutes throughout the regions.

In Toronto, and in many major cities throughout the affected areas, skyscrapers went dark, traffic lights shut down, subways and streetcars came to a grinding halt, assembly lines stopped moving, and millions of workers and motorists spilled on to busy streets — in a scene far too similar to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.

“We’ve pretty much shut down everything around here,” says Rick Miller, line-haul manager for MacKinnon Transport, adding the company’s head office in Guelph, Ont. was still without power when contacted by Today’s Trucking this morning. “We got a couple generators trying to support our operations, we have an IT guy working around the clock to download information from our live link, we’re hand pumping fuel out of fuel tanks for our trucks. It’s pretty hectic.”

While power started slowly coming back to some blacked-out areas early this morning, officials are indicating it still may be a day or two before full power is restored to all affected areas. U.S. media was reporting early today that there are indications the problem may have started somewhere in the Midwest, perhaps Ohio, instead of New York or Niagara Falls as it was originally believed.

Officials are now reporting that the basic problem wasn’t a power shortage, but rather a failure of the transmission system of wires, transformers and other equipment that carry power to customers — otherwise known as the grid. One mishap can suddenly make the flow dramatically unstable, a problem that can have a Domino effect in shutting down power from one part of the grid to many others.

While engineers work to correct the situation, officials are asking those who have had power returned not to use their electricity if it’s not necessary. With the situation still unstable, waves with too much power can travel out of control, damaging equipment along the way, and forcing the shutdown of part of the grid all over again.

John Ahearn, operations supervisor at Cambridge-based Challenger Motor Freight, says his company was fortunate enough to have a backup generator that fed power until it returned at about 9:00 p.m. last night. While business was “almost back to normal” this morning, he said the company is still trying to play catch-up getting freight dropped off. “We’re trying to get in touch with our customers, making sure they are in a situation to accept the loads or have us pick the load up.”

MacKinnon too is scrambling to direct trucks, some of which have been stranded up to six hours at the border, others parked in parts of the U.S., unable to make their drops due to a lack of power at the receiving facility. “In the meantime, we’ve instructed (drivers) in power grid areas like Western Canada to continue to run, but fuel up before they come into the Ontario or into the Horseshoe,” Miller said.

While it was still too early to put a number on the financial impact the historic blackout would have on his company or other carriers in similar situations, Miller did speculate: “It’s probably not going to be good.”

Rick Gaetz, president of Vitran Corp. — one of Canada’s largest for-hire trucking companies — wondered aloud how many more obstacles the Canadian trucking industry would have to try to hurdle. “I keep asking what other negative external forces can keep hitting the market,” he told Today’s Trucking from his Toronto office. “First there was September 11th, a very difficult winter, SARS, mad cow, fuel pricing, etc. It seems there’s always another one around the corner that you just haven’t been smart enough to think of yet.”

–with files from CP