It appears that this was the largest power outage on record, in a variety of respects (geographic reach, number of grid line-miles, megawatts of capacity, number of affected customers, etc.). Despite all the noise already arising about the "antiquated" American grid, it's important to recognize how stable and reliable it generally is. (did Bill Richardson really say "third world"? now there's someone who doesn't know anything about power engineering here *or* there) The reason is simple: it gets down to good engineering practiced over 100 years. Strogatz and Watts did an interesting "small world" analysis of the western power grid about six years ago. A more recent paper by Motter and Lai compares cascading failures of the Internet at the AS level and the western power grid -- side by side! http://chaos1.la.asu.edu/~yclai/papers/PRE_02_ML_3.pdf Some of this work is now being transmuted into practical form at EPRI and other transmission research places: http://www.epri.com/programHigh.asp?objid=261741 The emergent properties of the power grid and the net are similar for quite obvious reasons. Whether consciously done or not, good design requires hierarchical ordering, loose coupling of regional systems, self-healing and "immune response" mechanisms, and so forth. These are then discoverable at the mathematical level, which is what the "small world" approach is all about. Neglect of infrastructure certainly raises the prospects for cascading failures. But the causality associated with one single incident -- even one as widespread as msblast or the August 14 power failure, is not easily attributable to any single element, even if an initial failure point can be identified. Fred