Akron — 15 years ago Tuesday, it was a dark day in Northeast Ohio. Literally.
The power went out to some 45 million people in the United States, plus another 10 million in Ontario, Canada.
The anniversary comes just days after a widespread outage on Cleveland's west side over the weekend.
While it was not even in the same league as the one in 2003, only 40,000 customers were affected in this recent case, both events feature the power companies blamed as saying, 'we’re not the only ones at fault.'
In fact, when it comes to the 2003 outage, Mark Durbin of First Energy tells us, "To say it was just FirstEnergy not really accurate."
There's no question that FirstEnergy took a lot of heat on that hot summer day.
It was the world's second biggest blackout ever, affecting some 55 million people throughout the Northeast, Midwest and Ontario, Canada
Some got back power in a few hours, other waited up to two weeks. But everyone was calling for the power company's heads.
"If the best they can do is to operate in such a shoddy and irresponsible way. If that's the best they can do, that's not good enough,” said Dennis Kucinich who was a U.S. Representative for Ohio at the time.
The blackout's primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at a FirstEnergy Control Room, so operators weren’t alerted that the system was going into overload.
It happened after power lines, which fed into an Eastlake generating plant, hit overgrown trees.
So what some say should have been a manageable local blackout, collapsed the entire electric grid.
"There were not a lot of standards back then. Now there are. And those standards are mandatory by the Federal Government and they’re enforceable,” Durbin told us.
He referred to a Joint U.S./Canadian Task Force which studied the Blackout. It found 800 events went wrong that day. And it came back with 46 recommendations to prevent a repeat.
"Whether it's how you run your equipment, what kind of equipment you have, how you trim back your trees. Now they’re mandatory and enforceable,” he said.
This weekend's incident was caused by an equipment failure at a FirstEnergy sub-station. But the company again says they’re not totally at fault.
It points to Cleveland Public Power, which did not have an operational back-up line. The city admits it has been out of service since December, 2016.
“We've been working on fixing it. Sometimes these systems are very complicated,” said CPP Commissioner Ivan Henderson at a news conference Monday.
Since the line won't be fixed until next month, we could go dark again. But as for a repeat of 2003, Durbin says, "When you look back on it and all of the things are different now than they were 15 years ago. It's just an entirely different system."
Utility companies like FirstEnergy are regulated by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which can fine companies if they drop the ball. But Cleveland Public Power is overseen by the city of Cleveland, so they're not under the same rules.
I called to see what, if any, action the city or CPP was going to take after this weekend's failure. I didn't hear back.