Brilliant (28 page)

Twenty-eight of the forty-two power plants in the region shut down, and the darkness sped south and east within the span of just over twenty minutes. At 5:17 Rochester and Binghamton, New York, shut down. Then eastern Massachusetts, the Hudson Valley, New York City, and Long Island lost power. All of Connecticut shut down at 5:30. Parts of Vermont and southwestern New Hampshire—the last to go—went dark at 5:38. The plant on Staten Island maintained power because it was able to break free of its network connection before failure. This good fortune was as bewildering as the bad:

In the New York State system ... the 345,000 volt lines ... are so designed so that a region hit by a local power failure can immediately have a surge of energy sent to it from ... another power source.... To be capable of this instantaneous action, the system must be able to accept a wide range of power loads. Hence the main trunk, the electric superhighway bisecting the state, is not equipped with circuit-breakers sensitive to slight changes in load. The decision to cut a local system out of the grid is a human one and the actual cut-off must be done manually at a local control center.

But on Staten Island, for some reason, a circuit breaker tripped unexpectedly, automatically severing it from the rest of the grid. The manager of system operations there could only say, "I don't know why it opened."

Northern New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland had systems that carried lesser voltage, and their circuit breakers were set to trip automatically, which severed them from the grid in time. The state of Maine's power system was only weakly connected to the rest of New England's and so was able to cut itself off from the failure and subsequently lend power to parts of New Hampshire. The lights in these areas formed a fringe of illumination around a vast darkness: almost everyone across 80,000 square miles of the northeastern United States and part of Ontario—30 million people—had lost their electricity.

At the time of the breakdown, there was no apparent reason for the outage—no storm, no high winds or lightning, no trees touching high-tension wires—and the cause would not be known for days. In each power plant, engineers and technicians were left to wonder whether something in their own system had triggered the shutdown, while people in the countryside—accustomed to occasional local outages even in good weather—naturally thought that maybe a car had hit a pole somewhere down the road. In the cities, there were vague notions of sabotage: "'The Chinese,' a housewife on New York's East Side thought when she saw New York fade from her window, and then was a little ashamed." And "through the minds of two knowledgeable newspapermen flashed the same thought at about the same time, as they were to discover later. Both thought, 'The anti-Vietnam demonstrators have pulled something off.'" Some said it was an earthquake; others recalled extraordinary times. "I could see the New York skyline from my windows," remarked a woman from Brooklyn. "All of a sudden, it's dark—dead, kind of. The last time was in the war, it was dark about the same way."

In New York City—the world's most concentrated electric market—800,000 people were trapped in the subway; countless others were in elevators—"like hamsters in their cages," a
New York Times
reporter would say—or in offices high up in skyscrapers. Those riding on escalators "glided down more and more slowly, until, at last, they were scarcely moving at all." Not everyone risked descending to the street by way of the darkened stairwells. More than five hundred people would spend the night in the forty-eight-story skyscraper that housed the offices of
Life
magazine, and an emergency medical center would be set up in the lobby.

Those already in their cars and on their way home had limited fuel, since gas pumps needed electricity to run. All the stoplights failed, and although some citizens tried to direct traffic and policemen set flares in the roads at dangerous forks and intersections to help drivers negotiate their way, most of the city was quickly snarled in gridlock. Some native New Yorkers walked across the bridges—flashlights and transistors in hand—for the first time in their lives. Others caught rides by hooking onto the back bumpers of crowded buses. Cabbies hiked up their fares. A. M. Rosenthal wrote, "As usual New Yorkers helped gouge themselves. They stood in the roadway, flagged down taxis and shouted 'Thirty dollars to Brooklyn!' 'Ten dollars to the Village!'" It would be said of that night that it was easier to cross the Atlantic to Cairo than to get to Stamford, Connecticut, from the city.

***

"The more efficient the technology, the more catastrophic its destruction when it collapses," observes Wolfgang Schivelbush. This was a given, and although utility executives and engineers always acknowledged that a widespread failure of the grid could occur, few believed that it would, and they'd made no contingency plans for an extensive, cascading failure. Their confidence had fostered a sense of complacency: out of 150 hospitals in New York City, fewer than half had adequate backup power. Doctors had to perform emergency surgeries by flashlight, and five babies were born by candlelight at St. Francis Hospital.

Likewise, the airports were entirely unprepared for the loss of power. They had no radar for six hours and no field lighting. High above the city, airplanes lost their ground orientation and were unable to land. "It was a beautiful night," recalled one pilot. "You could see a million miles. You could see the Verrazano Bridge and parts of Brooklyn, but beyond Brooklyn, where we usually see the runways at Kennedy and Floyd Bennett Field it was dark.... I thought 'another Pearl Harbor.'" Kennedy International Airport closed down for almost twelve hours, though several hours into the blackout, LaGuardia was able to light one runway with power from a water-pump generator. Both New York airports had to cancel or divert about 250 flights; some had to be rerouted as far away as Bermuda.

The fine, clear voices that ordinarily gave the news of world—the dead in Vietnam, the protesters at home, the condition of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower's heart—turned tinny and staticky, reduced to the sound on transistor radios. The first reports that came through were wildly inaccurate, claiming that the blackout stretched all the way to Miami, that it reached to Chicago, that Canada lay in darkness. The fears would not be allayed for several hours. "We still knew nothing about what had really happened, what had created our predicament," recalled a
New Yorker
writer, "but just then anybody who might still have been worried that the blackout heralded a foreign takeover was reassured by an announcement from the Pentagon, over the little transistors, that it had no effect on our 'defense posture.'...The power companies soon provided similar comfort, with their talk of 'outage.'" Still, rumors would live long after the lights returned.

The true quiet of the world felt strange, "as if the darkness had somehow smudged away the horns and the other noises of the traffic." Electrical sounds, like Pythagoras's music of the spheres, had always been in people's ears and were what they took for silence. In the relative hush, suddenly a million little things were in danger of perishing. Damp glass greenhouses began to cool down. At the Bronx and Central Park zoos, "the men, working without sleep, stuffed blankets between the bars in the small-mammals house, where diminutive, heat-sensitive lemurs, flying squirrels, and small monkeys began their nocturnal peregrinations. The reptile house presented a difficult problem, since no one was willing to try to wrap a cobra in a blanket. Small portable propane gas heaters were taken in to warm the cold-blooded vipers, anacondas, iguanas, caymans, crocodiles and their ilk." It may have been too cold for iguanas, but the temperature outside was perfect for storing blood—between 38 and 41 degrees—so hospitals and blood banks took their supplies to the roofs for keeping.

Night was truly night again, just as in the Middle Ages, and, also as in the Middle Ages, light became precious once more. People struck match after match to light their way down flights of stairs: "Two matches, carefully tended, were enough to light the distance between one floor and the next. Walking down eighteen flights to the lobby, we used exactly thirty-six matches." People shared candles with one another, and gougers sold them on the streets. Tapers stuck in beer and wine bottles or tea lights set on saucers illuminated cold meals in homes, restaurants, and coffee shops, as well as a banquet in the Astor Ballroom. They flickered alongside pool games and across the faces of actors preparing for a performance—the lights, after all, could come back on at any time. They burned in newsrooms and at newsstands, in firehouses and police stations, on the mayor's desk and beside card games on trains. Wax dripped onto tabletops and onto floors; days later newspapers would publish instructions on how to remove it from surfaces.

Just as the lights went out, the moon, a day after full, was rising:

The moonlight lay on the streets like thick snow, and we had a curious, persistent feeling that we were leaving footprints in it. Something was odd about buildings and corners in this beautiful light. The city presented a tilted aspect, and even our fellow-pedestrians, chattering with implacable cheerfulness, appeared foreshortened as they passed; they made us think of people running downhill. It was a block more before we understood: The shadows, for once, all fell in the same direction—away from the easterly, all-illuminating moon.... We were in a night forest, and, for a change, home lay not merely uptown but north.

Without that moon, the night of November 9, 1965, would have been very different. Air tragedy, it was said, had been averted because its light, along with that made possible by auxiliary power in the main control towers at the airports, was enough for pilots already in descent to see by. The previous night, rainstorms had soaked the region, and clouds had covered the moon and stars. Had the lights gone out then, there surely would have been more than one disaster. As it was, emergency rooms filled with people who'd been hit by cars or tripped on the sidewalks. There were pockets of looting, but by dawn there would be less crime reported than on an ordinary November night.

Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves—simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops—the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches—without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty, and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things. Skyscrapers take on a geological sheen, and the stars resemble those of ancient times.

Yet unlike in ancient times, people weren't accustomed to giving in to the long November night. For most, the dark wasn't restful; it simply felt as if the world had stopped and everyone and everything were suspended in amber, especially after the novelty of the first hour wore off. For as long as no one had any idea at all how long the helplessness would go on, there was no future, and no knowing the future. After a few hours, theaters canceled their scheduled performances, and people ran out of pocket money. They were still lined up outside phone booths waiting to call home, but what could they say other than that they were somewhere? November 9–10, 1965, became known as "the night of the long night," and it was particularly long for those trying to sleep in hotel lobbies or on office floors; in barber chairs or on cots in banquet rooms; curled up in hallways or sprawled on subway stairs or benches in train stations.

Meanwhile, throughout the affected area, each local utility had become an island again, and in each affected power station not only were the managers looking at systems that had no obvious failure, but they were also still unsure as to whether their own station was at fault or merely one link in the cascade. They had to get their system back up with the same equipment that had shut it down, and although it took only a few seconds to lose power, it would take hours to get back on-line—for it's no simple thing to align the spheres again. All switches, relays, and circuit breakers had to be checked, as did turbines, generators, and boilers. "The turbine generators had to be turned slowly by mechanical means to make sure they had not been bowed out of shape in the blackout." The power failure itself had caused some damage. For instance, turbine bearings at Con Edison's Ravenswood plant were damaged by lack of lubrication during the lapse in power.

Power was needed to beget power. "Unfortunately many of the affected utilities had made no provision for the unlikely possibility that their entire system would shut down simultaneously and, hence, there were no independent auxiliary power sources for such an eventuality. Intricate circuits had to be established, some from remote sources, to feed in the essential auxiliary power." Even with power, the enormous boilers, some of which were as tall as fifteen-story buildings, had to be heated up to 3,000 degrees, and the pressure had to be built up to more than 2,000 pounds per square inch. And everything couldn't be turned on at once, or it would overload the system. "As power became available, it was essential that the load be picked up in a careful, sectionalized, synchronized process. As each section was brought up to load, it was necessary to synchronize its frequency with that of the energized remainder of the system. It was then possible to tie the section in with the remainder of the network without disturbing the maintenance of the network's synchronism."

Service was restored to parts of New York and New England within a few hours, but it would be almost midnight before northern New York State was completely back online; Boston and Long Island didn't get power until 1:00
A.M.
In New York City, it would take more than thirteen hours for the power to fully return.

The electric lights of New York—the gaudy marquees and overlit skyscrapers, which had for decades far exceeded necessity—accounted for a small fraction of the overall power demand. Even so, it was by light that most people had come to gauge their connection to life, and it was the loss of light that was most remarked upon. The following day, the headline of an Italian newspaper read: "New York Cancelled by Darkness."