NEW YORK: The great blackout of 2003 which affected eight states in north-east US and several counties in Canada could end up costing in excess of $30 billion, according to initial estimates.

New York City alone was setback by over $1 billion, up to $40 million in tax revenue and up to $10 million in overtime pay. Other cities are still calculating their losses which experts say could bring the total losses as a consequence of the blackout to over $30 billion.

However, officials here have not been able to pinpoint the source of the massive outage that appeared to have started in the Midwest and spread through eight states and Canada. Canada and the United States formed a joint task force on Friday to investigate and determine how to prevent it from happening again.

Nora Mead Brownell, a commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said on Saturday that it was clear the power grid needed work. “Regardless of what the root cause was, it was clearly exacerbated by a system that is unable to support today’s economy,” she told a television news show.

Just as they did after major blackouts in the north-east in 1959, 1961, 1965 and 1977, investigators are trying to figure out exactly what set off the avalanche of failure. In 1965, it was a faulty breaker on a single power cable just north of the Niagara Falls area. In 1977, it was a series of lightning strikes. But what all the failures had in common is that the grid — complicated beyond full understanding, even by experts — lives and occasionally dies by its own mysterious rules, said the New York Times.