started a cascading rolling failure that shut down 265 power plants. 508 generating units. including 10 nuclear power stations. all of that happened in the span of eight minutes. by 4:15 p.m. outages had cascaded across ohio, michigan, pennsylvania, new york, vermont and parts of canada. parts of ontario blacked out. 50 million people without power, the largest outage in north american history. power was not fully restored for 48 hours. all because of what started with that one tree. it became a huge problem what happened with that one tree because of the shocking vulnerability of this electrical grid that we've got. which we started building in the 1800s with wires and wooden poles. ten years after that giant blackout of the whole northeast, question, of course, is, could