Power grid put to test as US, Canada return to work

The timing of last week's blackout -- the biggest the continent has ever seen -- was fortuitous in that it struck Thursday afternoon, just before the weekend, giving officials breathing space to put the system back in order.

Millions in the United States and Canada saw electricity and water services gradually restored over the weekend but officials warned of more potential blackouts as the working week got under way.

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"We're not out of the woods," Pat Wood, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told NBC's "Meet the Press" program Sunday.

New York Governor George Pataki said all six of the state's nuclear power plants should be back online by Monday morning bringing them back to near full-capacity generation.

"I believe everything within New York that we can control will be absolutely sound," Pataki said.

But the governor also acknowledged that concerns over the power grid would only disappear once the precise cause of Thursday afternoon's massive outage had been located.

"On Monday, millions of New Yorkers will set foot back in the subways," he said. "We know that our system will be up and running but we cannot say with 100-percent certainty that this can't happen again until we know what happened and what steps are being taken to prevent it again."

Officials in Toronto, Canada's largest city, said the subway system there, which carries more than a million passengers a day, would be up and running Monday.

But Ontario Premier Ernie Eves made a televised appeal to everyone in the province, "to operate at approximately 50 percent of the power they normally use."

"It won't be 'business as usual'," he warned.

The city of Cleveland, Ohio, lifted an advisory calling on residents to boil water late Sunday. But officials warned that beaches in the area were still unsafe for swimming because of untreated sewage pouring into Lake Erie.

The same was true in the New York region after sewage plants that failed during the blackout dumped huge amounts of raw sewage into city waterways.