At one point, an engineer at the Midwest grid-managing organization asked engineers at the Ohio utility, FirstEnergy, to explain why they had not responded to a line outage reported sometime earlier and asked that they find out what was going on. "We have no clue. Our computer is giving us fits, too," replied a FirstEnergy technician identified as Jerry Snickey. "We don't even know the status of some of the stuff (power fluctuations) around us."