Especially in a heatwave in the late afternoon when the system is stretched to near the limit. One local malfunction is all it takes for the grid to start shutting down.
From today's WSWS article on the subjects..(with interesting article links to the California 'rolling blackout' fiasco and Davis's role there):
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The human costs of the massive power failure are still being tallied. But the suffering and anxiety faced by millions of ordinary working people stands in stark contrast to the preoccupations of the political elite. After ruling out the possibility of a terrorist attack, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg blandly advised those left without transport and caught in traffic to stay calm and go home, open windows and drink plenty of liquids. He was greeted with loud boos from a crowd of pedestrians when he ventured onto the streets, accompanied by security and the media to close off the Brooklyn Bridge.
Ensconced in a hotel in San Diego, President Bush maintained a complete silence for hours before issuing a perfunctory statement, declaring that federal officials were working alongside state and local emergency services to cope with the problems. Claiming that emergency services were “better organised” since September 11, he remarked that it “has been remarkable to watch on TV” how calmly people reacted. Only some time later did Bush feel the need to respond to the implications of this catastrophic infrastructure failure, saying that perhaps the power grid would need to be “modernised”. His staff indicated that the president did not intend to cut short his fund-raising trip to California.
The immediate cause of the blackout has yet to be identified. But officials in Canada and the US have been quick to point the finger at others. A spokesperson for New York Governor Pataki declared that the reason for the outage was “a possible transmission problem from Canada to the US”. Canadian officials, on the other hand, thought that a lightning strike on a power plant in the Niagara region--on the US side of the border--had been responsible. In the Niagara area, power station operators denied there had been any problems.
In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg also blamed a power failure in the Niagara Mohawk area--outside his immediate area of responsibility. “It was probably a natural occurrence which disrupted the power system up there and it apparently for reasons we don’t know cascaded down through New York state over into Connecticut, as far south as New Jersey and as far west as Ohio,” he said. He dismissed persistent rumours that a fire in a Manhattan power station had caused the blackout, saying that the smoke had been the result of a controlled shutdown of the plant.
Regardless of what triggered the disastrous blackout, its underlying causes are well known and have been warned about for years. Privatisation, mergers, costcutting and restructuring have resulted in a lack of investment in new plant and maintenance. As a consequence, the various power grids across the US have become increasingly unstable, particularly at times of high demand such as during heat waves. Any fault in one plant or at one point in the transmission system creates a cascading effect as one station after another shuts down automatically to avoid dangerous overloading.
Rest:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/elec-a15.shtml 
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