Some fortunate families are able to switch on the lights as they wake up this morning, with power being restored in pockets across the province.
Sections of Toronto, Oakville, Hamilton and Scarborough are among those with electricity this morning. About half of the province has restored power.
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"They are working diligently to bring as many generators back up as they can," Mr. Eves said. "They have connected the three units at Bruce with the grid system which is good news."
Friends Leigh Farrar, Gord Cameron and Shelia Garsnell work together on dinner by candlelight on Thursday, in London, Ont. (Dave Chidley/CP)
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"Darlington and Pickering will be down, possibly for a couple of days or more because once those units go into a certain mode, they go into safety mode or they shut down and it takes a while to get them back up."
"There is no definitive time as to when I can tell you that power will be up all over the province," he said. "It will come on in blocks and pieces."
An Ontario Power Generation spokesman told Globeandmail.com that all 80 generating stations run by the group were in safe mode as of 6:30 a.m. Friday, awaiting instructions from the Independent Market Operator, which will be directing power stations as they spark back to life.
"Some residents may have to go without power unfortunately for the whole weekend," Toronto's deputy mayor told a Friday morning press conference. "It's going to take longer than anticipated."
Everyone is asked to use all power sparingly, and to remember that restored power could easily go out again. Mr. Eves asked that air conditioning be turned off and that motorists stay off the roads until normalcy is restored.
Bob Runciman, minister of public safety, said "the system is fragile. If we all continue to use electricity the way we would normally, the system is at risk of failing and causing more blackouts." He asked those with restored power not to turn on TVs or do laundry.
Earlier Thursday, a power outage of unprecedented impact hit huge swaths of Ontario and parts of the United States, leaving millions of people without power as officials warned some would stay that way for days.
At 4:15 p.m. the blackout also cut power to such U.S. cities as New York, Cleveland and Detroit. Terrorism was quickly ruled out by officials with reports pointing to lightning or a fire at a power plant.
Hydro One official Al Manchee said many would be forced to wait out the blackout in the dark.
Hydro One's Anne Creighton explained that parts of Canada are vulnerable to blackouts if U.S. power goes down because the grids are in some cases connected.
Parts of Ontario and Quebec are on the same power grid as the northeastern region of the United States, she explained. "We're all interconnected, so an impact outside of our jurisdiction could affect our system."
Bill Graham, Minister of Foreign Affairs, told CBC's Peter Mansbridge that Ontario's emergency preparedness officials were working closely with their U.S. counterparts. He said the two countries have a very good agreement on natural disasters that worked well in this case.Bruce Campbell, a spokesman for Ontario's Independent Electricity Market Operator, said people should expect rolling blackouts over the next couple of days until power is fully restored, The Globe's Richard Bloom reports.
Mayor Mel Lastman asked citizens to conserve water over the next two days, and applauded all those who were helping their neighbours. Police noted that they would be patrolling residential areas throughout the evening, but were happy that no major crimes had been reported.
The blackout is another hit to Toronto's tourism industry, not only because of the number of cancelled flights once expected to land in the city. "Obviously there's going to be some discomfort when you stay in a hotel," Toronto deputy mayor Case Ootes said at a Friday press conference, referring to restrictions on the use of air conditioning over the coming weekend.
Not terrorism, Pentagon says
Pentagon officials in Washington were quick to say the cascading afternoon blackouts in sweltering summer temperatures were not an act of terrorism.
But into the early evening, there were still conflicting theories about why a 15,000-square-kilometre stretch of land was blacked out at about 4:15 p.m.
The Prime Minister's Office first said lightning had struck a power plant in the Niagara Region on the U.S. side of the border, but later said there had been a fire at a Con Edison power plant in Niagara Falls, N.Y.
But the Department of National Defence said it was indeed lightning that wiped out power.
As darkness fell, Defence Minister John McCallum weighed in, speaking for a cabinet committee that deals with national emergencies. He pointed the finger at a fire at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, but he had no other details. The PMO said it was getting its information from U.S. officials, and blamed them for the changing picture.
By early evening, Hydro One, the Crown corporation that operates the province's power, was separating from the U.S. system in order to restore order, said Jim Munson, aide to Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
But while officials tried to sort out what had gone wrong, it was reported that most in Ontario, home to more than 10 million people, were without electricity save for some in the province's northwest. The greater Toronto area, with a population of five million, ground to a complete halt.
From Ottawa to Windsor
The blackout stretched to Ottawa in the east, Windsor in the western reaches of the province and North Bay in the near north.
Toronto police said there had been no major incidents, despite the chaos and paralysis caused by the blackout. In New York, with almost eight million people one of the largest cities in the world, was turned into a horn-blowing gridlock. Manhattan streets were flooded with pedestrians who had no idea how they would get home.
Police in Toronto praised the way the city's residents stayed calm.
"We're very encouraged by the way this emergency has developed," said Sgt. Jim Muscat.
"We're in this together as a community."
U.S. cities: New York to Cleveland
In the U.S., cities stretching from New York to Cleveland and Detroit were affected. Thousands of people streamed onto the streets of lower Manhattan following the blackout in a scene reminiscent of the first hour after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. For some, even those far from Manhattan, the similarities were frightening.
"I was in the office building," said Dean Petrovich, 33, a property tax consultant in Toronto. "I just walked down 20 flights - I didn't want to be in any building."
Upon hearing that it was a widespread outage, Petrovich added: ``Now I'm freaked out. I've tried using my cellphone - I can't get a hold of anyone."
While there were some reports that the Niagara-Mohawk power grid had overloaded, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on CNN to point the finger briefly at Canada. The outage, he said at one point, might have originated in Niagara Falls, Ont. A later CNN report said it began in Ottawa, the nation's capital, where the everlasting Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill was snuffed out by the blackout.
A helping hand
But while the majestic Parliament Hill in Ottawa was forced to operate with only scant lighting, Gatineau, a stone's throw away across the Quebec border, had all the power it needed. Other provinces - Nova Scotia and New Brunswick - were sending their excess power to the grid, said Margaret Murphy, of Nova Scotia Power.
"Between ourselves, likely New Brunswick and possibly Maine, we'll probably be sending about 100 megawatts into the greater New England area," she said, adding that amount wouldn't come close to solving the power problems.
Ontario Premier Ernie Eves denied the province's dependence on imported power played any role in the ordeal. "We've imported power - more than 10 per cent - on lots of occasions for the last 70 years in this province at peak times when demand goes up as high as it did today to 25,000 megawatts," he said.
"We all pay the price when we're interconnected. There's no way of avoiding that because all the jurisdictions in the northeastern part of North America interchange power." Officials said late Thursday they were particularly concerned about a potentially dangerous surge once power was restored that could cause further blackouts as far as Manitoba and the American Midwest.
Almost 40 years ago, on Nov. 9, 1965, Ontario and the northeastern seaboard experienced a similar blackout, although that was many years before businesses and citizens became so heavily reliant on high-tech telecommunications. Residents were kept in the dark from anywhere from five minutes to 13 hours in that blackout.
With reports from Richard Mackie
