TORONTO - When the lights went out one hot August afternoon five years ago, then-premier Ernie Eves - like most people in Ontario - didn't think much of it.

Brief power outages were a common occurrence at his home in Caledon, about 40 kilometres northwest of Toronto, where Eves was preparing for a nomination meeting that would have signalled that an election was imminent.

"So when power went out, I just assumed it was a simple case of 'Oh well, here we go again,"' he said.

"That turned out, obviously, not to be true. And we had a much more serious problem."

Within minutes, Eves was transported to the local provincial police station, then flown to Toronto by helicopter, which landed in a downtown schoolyard. The city, along with much of Ontario and eight U.S. states, had been plunged in complete disarray.

Streetcars and subways had halted in their tracks, trapping commuters in pitch-black tunnels below streets gridlocked with rush-hour traffic. Seniors were stuck in elevators and high-rise apartments, while stranded airport passengers anxiously wondered if the country was under terrorist attack.

What had initially been dismissed as a temporary blip in the power grid on Aug. 14, 2003 turned out to be the largest blackout in North American history, leaving some 50 million people without electricity, including major cities like New York.

Eves recalled his cabinet and declared a state of emergency, launching a massive conservation effort that lasted more than a week while the power grid recharged.

"I know I virtually lived at command headquarters for many days," he recalls.

"And it was very rewarding to see how people pulled together. I mean, people didn't point fingers or blame, they just got on with solving the problem."

But there was a political price to be paid. Three months after the power went out, voters pulled the plug on his Conservative government, ending the party's eight-year reign in Ontario.

The blackout was a dramatic symbol of the "indecision and dithering" that plagued Eves' government, which was still recovering from the SARS outbreak in Toronto and lingering worries over mad cow disease, said Bryan Evans, associate politics professor at Toronto's Ryerson University.

"The blackout brought everything together around the kind of indecision that was beginning to form about the Eves government," he said.

Criticized for being slow to respond in the first hours of the blackout, Eves became a media fixture as the outage dragged on, providing regular updates on the situation while urging businesses and residents to conserve power.