New Yorkers enjoyed the return of electric power to their city on Saturday as the United States and Canada tried to find out what caused the worst blackout in North American history.

A day after the lights went out in the Northeastern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario, the White House announced a cross-border task force on the crisis that plunged as many as 50 million people into darkness.

"We need to take a look at what went wrong, analyze the problem and come up with a solution. We don't know yet what went wrong but we will," US President George W. Bush said during a visit to California.

"I view it as a wake-up call," the president told reporters, describing the blackout as "an indication we need to modernize the electricity grid."

Bush, who discussed the crisis for the first time with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, said investigators must find out why outages spread so quickly to New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Ottawa, Toronto and a host of smaller cities.

Chretien had suggested earlier that the cause of the power collapse lay in the United States, but some US utility officials insisted the problem started in Canada.

As night fell across the Manhattan skyline on Friday, lights shone from the Empire State Building, Times Square reclaimed its garish neon luster and Broadway theaters opened for a full schedule of performances.

The New York Mets played baseball at Shea Stadium, but the city's subways, a mainstay of life for 7 million commuters, were not expected to resume service until early on Saturday morning.

"We are getting there," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg, applauding the 8 million New York residents for their efforts to get by without electricity and air conditioning in sweltering temperatures.

"It tells you something about New Yorkers," he said.

RAPID COLLAPSE

While officials were still unable to explain exactly what caused such a rapid collapse in the power grid, Americans expressed relief that they had not been the victims of a terrorist act.

US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said there was "no evidence it was an intentional act."

Emergency procedures designed to evacuate people from subways and elevators worked well. People took the inconvenience with good humor and law and order prevailed in most places.

Police in Ottawa reported some looting and also attributed two deaths to the outage. New York reported only one death, a 40-year-old woman who died of a heat-related heart attack during a building evacuation.

Telephone systems slowly began returning to normal, but there were still difficulties, particularly on wireless networks. Banks worked to reopen branches and automatic teller machines.

Stranded commuters spent the night in their offices or on the streets, and thousands of frustrated travelers were trapped at New York's three main airports as airlines were forced to cancel hundreds of flights.

In Washington, the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee said it would convene hearings on the blackout when Congress returned next month from its summer break.

New York Gov. George Pataki said he wanted to know why the system crashed so catastrophically.

"How did this happen, why did it happen and why did we have a systemic failure across the power grid in the Northeast when we were told after the blackout in the 1960s that this would not happen again?" Pataki said.

Procedures put in place after a huge blackout in 1965 failed to isolate breakdowns to small areas of the country.

Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said much of the US electricity system was 50 or 60 years old.

"We're a superpower with a third-world grid. We need a new grid," said Richardson, now governor of New Mexico.

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