By Michael Weissenstein
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Warnings of trouble in the sprawling electric power grid ahead of the nation's worst blackout came too late, or not at all, over a telephone hot line network created to prevent widespread breakdowns, power officials and politicians said Monday.

Investigators were probing the role of the low-tech system of phones put in place to disseminate information between regional power groups to avert just such a crisis.

Failures in Ohio transmission lines prompted at least three conversations last Thursday between FirstEnergy Corp., the utility that owns them, and the industry group that manages transmission across much of the Midwest, said Mary Lynn Webster, a spokeswoman for the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator.

Webster said the Midwest group initiated the first contact with FirstEnergy. The group is reviewing recordings of those conversations and computer logs and other data.

Those electricity transmission line failures, which began around 3:06 p.m., are a focus of the investigation and suspected in the blackout's possible starting point.

The failures were snowballing into systemwide disturbances by the time the Midwest group spoke with its counterpart in Pennsylvania, said Bob Hinkel, general manager of PJM Interconnection, which manages power across much of seven states and the District of Columbia.

"We know that as the specific events began to unfold we had some conversation with them about what we were observing in our system," Hinkel said. "The immediate response is you call the other operator."

FirstEnergy spokesman Todd Schneider said he could not provide any information about the conversations.

Premier Ernie Eves of Ontario complained that U.S. power managers did not notify their Canadian counterparts about the problems, either, as required under protocols developed after a 1965 blackout across much of the same region.

And many individual utility companies said they had little or no indication of problems in the system before their own facilities shut down.

"The first indication that we had was when we started to see our transmission lines trip out," said Ralph LaRossa, vice president of electric delivery for New Jersey's PSE&G.

A timeline of power problems compiled by the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group investigating the outage, showed power swings in the Eastern U.S. and Canada by 4:08 p.m. and a series of line failures in Michigan starting about nine minutes later.

In Lansing, Mich., employees of the Board of Water and Light noticed irregularities on the grid, but nothing that seemed unusual. Spokesman John Strickler said any information about problems elsewhere would have helped the utility cope with the blackout.

"It looks like stuff started about an hour before this hit us. It would be nice if when the first system went down that there was an alert," he said. "We had no idea this was coming."