Probably someone in Cleveland flushed one of those 3.5 gallon per flush instruments of the devil. Those old water closets are so dangerous that they aren't even sold here and just the thought made a computer mess up the calculations of demand for both a water pumping and a sewage pumping station. For fear that Lake Erie was going to be drained, with the loss of millions of walleyes (pickrel to those who don't know better in Canada) and the loss of billions of zebra mussels, the pumping system shut down, which knocked out all the power generating plants.
That makes about as much sense as anything I've heard yet.