August 21, 2003 - While the inquiry into the nation’s most devastating power system failure in history is not yet complete it appears that the cascading blackout commenced in lines owned by the largest utility company, FirstEnergy headquartered in Akron, Ohio. A failure in one of the company’s 14,700 miles of high-voltage transmission lines with 103 interconnections to 14 other electrical utility systems appears to have been the first to go down in the cascade that left 50 million people without electrical power.

Like ENRON the company is tied to the highest levels of the Bush Administration. FirstEnergy’s president, Anthony Alexander served with Ken Lay on the Administration’s Energy Transition Team. CEO Peter Burg hosted a fund raiser in June that saw Dick Cheney add $800,000 to the Bush re-election war chest. In 2002 the company made over $1.4 Million in contributions to political parties. 70% of that money went to the Republicans. That same year the company spent over $2 million lobbying lawmakers.

The company’s unionized employees have been complaining that layoffs of workers who maintain the FirstEnergy distribution system had an adverse impact on safety. Its Davis-Besse nuclear plant was ordered shut down when a hole the size of a football was revealed in the facility’s containment vessel leading Rep. Dennis Kucinich to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to revoke the company’s license. ABC news quoted a former First Energy senior manager as saying that the company’s present management placed profit over the safety of the public. A shareholder suit claims that First Energy has manipulated its financial records to make the company appear more profitable that it is. Recent SEC filings seem to bear the critics out.

FirstEnergy filed its second quarter financial statement with the SEC just minutes before the deadline. The filing showed that the company’s cash on hand had shrunk to just $64.2 million, down from the $359.1 million it held at the same time last year. The company reported revised earnings for 2002 reducing its reported net profit from $629.3 million to $552.8 million blaming the reduction on a correction of accounting for recovery of its Ohio assets. The item shown as the largest contributor to the decline in cash flow was labeled “other” without further explanation. The parallels to ENRON are unmistakable.

There is a smell here that blows from Akron to Washington. It is the smell of something rotten. The Whitehouse press office says that the investigation of the blackout will be thorough and complete even if it leads to a big contributor. It looks like that promise will be put to the test.