The U.S.-Canada task force investigating the Northeast blackout will release its findings after it assesses the 9-second period in which 34,000 miles (54,718 km) of high-voltage transmission lines and hundreds of power generating units went out of service, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Abraham, a co-chair of the task force.

According to Abraham, during those 9 seconds, thousands of events occurred that could have some role in the blackout. Many of the events were separated by just milliseconds, so all data must be synchronized to the atomic clock in Colorado, a process Michehl Gent said is difficult. Gent is president of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), which is working to finalize the sequence of events on August 14.

Gent said that the task force will decide whether or not to make public NERC's final timeline. The council had already released an abbreviated timeline that pointed to FirstEnergy Corp.'s Ohio system as the likely starting point for the outages.

Once the task force determines the exact order of events, it must analyze all of the events and data points to determine the causes. Then it will search for potential weaknesses in the systems of hardware, software, rules and procedures to find out what worked and what didn't.

“Any recommendations the joint U.S.-Canada task force makes will likely focus on technical standards for operation and maintenance of the grid, and on the management of performance of the grid,” Abraham said.