Blackout

BLACKOUT

James Goodman

North Point Press

A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

New York

Table of Contents

BLACKOUT

Epigraph

Preface

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53

Also by James Goodman

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgments

Copyright Page

For Jackson, Jennifer, and Samuel

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall

—Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Preface

On Wednesday, July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. It was the second big blackout in a dozen years, and those who were around for the first thought back to the crisp, moonlit evening in November 1965 when thirty million people, spread out over eighty thousand square miles of the Northeast, suddenly found themselves in the dark. The 1977 blackout was limited to the five boroughs and some northern suburbs, a few hundred square miles inhabited by 25 percent of those thirty million people. That night there was no moon, and an oppressive mass of hot air had just drifted into the metropolitan area. Meteorologists said the heat was there to stay.

In 1977, as in 1965, there was excitement, adventure, and fright in skyscrapers and subway tunnels; busy intersections and bus terminals; nightclubs, theaters, and concert halls; high-rise stairwells and department stores; elevators, emergency rooms, and ICUs. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. People displayed tremendous reserves of kindness, generosity, patience, and good humor. On just about every block in a city of thousands of blocks, some man or woman, boy or girl, proved himself or herself a hero. Strangers not only talked to strangers, they did whatever they could do to help them through the night.

For people who have never been in a big city during a blackout, it is a difficult night to imagine. So much of what makes New York the city that it is—the height of its buildings, the density of its population, the hours (twenty-four) of its operation, the mass of its mass-transit system, the brilliance of Broadway, the role of its business and finance in the work of the world—is made possible by electric power and light. New York City could not be New York, The City, without them. Yet it is worth the effort to try to imagine, for on those rare nights without electricity, in a city utterly dependent on it, there is simply so much to see. All the more in 1977, when some of what people saw was more complicated and less comforting than what they had seen twelve years before.

I begin my story in the last hour of light; take in the night and day of the blackout; and then dwell in its aftermath, when people argued about why people did what they did when the lights went out. For weeks that argument raged. Countless people had their say. Yet the argument was like the night: lots of heat, little light, and despite many penetrating observations and perfectly reasonable conclusions, it ended right where it began, as a shouting match between people who held fast to one explanation and people who held fast to another.

What was missing was not intelligence or analytical sophistication but common sense, and perhaps also a desire to find common ground. Few people were willing to consider the simple possibility that there were elements of truth in several explanations, let alone some combination of explanations. Or the possibility that no single explanation, no matter how useful for explaining the behavior of this person or that, could explain the behavior of thousands of people of different ages in different places at different times.

I do not offer a grand theory or synthesis. I have not fashioned a compromise that will satisfy both sides. My way of thinking about what happened is my story about what happened, and it will not be nearly as useful as the way that most people thought about what happened at the time. When it comes to utility—observations and conclusions that suggest particular courses of action—the parsimonious have it all over the complex.

Yet we are complicated creatures, and not just when the power fails. I juxtapose the wide range of blackout behavior and the narrow range of the argument about that behavior to encourage readers (as they read, watch the news, practice politics, talk with their students, teach their children, argue the world with colleagues, neighbors, strangers, and friends) to look warily upon answers that are incompatible with every other answer, explanations (whether of apparent heroism or cowardice, altruism or selfishness, success or failure) that can be expressed in thirty seconds or less.

I tell my story in bursts, re-creating incidents, deeds, accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments, trying to evoke mood and place and time. I cut from scene to scene rapidly, wishing I could be everywhere at once, see every sight, hear every word, miss nothing.

As I struggled with the form of this book, I naturally imagined others. One was more traditional, a book with fewer characters and scenes, each developed in great detail and depth. Instead of juxtaposing bits and pieces of experience, I would meld them into a single story, or at least connect and clarify them with arguments, summaries, and conclusions. But I decided that a more traditional form would detract from my effort to convey a sense of the wide variety of things people did in a night and a day, and the wide variety of reasons they did them. Rather than contribute to generalizations, I hope, at least momentarily, to confound them.

There is, of course, a vital place for generalization and for social and cultural synecdoche, stories in which individuals (or a small part of a community) represent the whole. There are vast expanses of our experience, past and present, that we couldn’t fully understand without them.

Yet there is something to be said for the dizzying accumulation of detail, the highlighting of differences often lost in generalizations based on the categories of census returns, public-opinion polls, and shallow social and cultural analysis. Something to be said for constructive humility as we try to answer essential but elusive questions about what moves us.

I am large, I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman writes. And who among us does not contain, if not multitudes, at least a few? Which makes a city, let alone a city of seven and a half million, a disorderly place. This book is an attempt to give that disorder, the multitudes within us, and among us, its due.

1

Afterward everyone wanted to know why.

There had to be a reason.

People wanted to know what it was.

Or they thought they knew what it was, and they wanted to say.

Either way, they talked about it, talked in English, Spanish, Russian, and Korean; in Japanese, French, and German; in Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese.

For weeks it seemed as if they talked about nothing else.

They talked about why, when the lights went out, people did the things that they did.

People also wanted to know why the lights went out in the first place.

Not everyone, but some:

Reporters. Mayor. Governor. City, state, and federal regulators. Certain customers. Even the president of the United States, who happened to have a keen interest in energy.

So they talked about it, and they asked Con Edison officials, who also wanted to know but would have preferred not to talk about it. They asked Con Edison to explain what went wrong.

There had to be a reason.

People wanted to know what it was.

Con Edison officials said it was lightning.

They hoped it was lightning.

Lightning is easy to explain, and there is no one, on earth, to blame.

Or they thought they knew what it was, and they wanted to say.

They thought there was a reason, one reason.

One reason for all the things those people did in the dark.

One reason for the things they do.

Electrical engineers said it was more complicated than that. Lightning may have played a role, but to say that lightning caused the blackout would be like saying the wind caused the capsizing of a poorly designed sailboat sailed by an inexperienced or even incompetent captain and crew.

Almost everyone agreed there was a reason.

There was lightning.

Not so much in the city, but just to the north, in the rocky rolling hills of Westchester County, the precious wedge of New York State that sits atop the Bronx. So much lightning that in Oradell, New Jersey, a budding scientist, nineteen years old, who climbed out on his roof after hearing severe storm warnings on the radio, could see it, great bolts in deep dark clouds. He stood thirty miles from the storm.

But people disagreed about what that reason was.

Half the city’s power came through Westchester.

It traveled along conductors, thick transmission cables, each made up of many strands of wire hung on hundred-foot steel towers. The towers were laid out like a letter Y—albeit a Y drawn by a very young child. The top of the Y leaned so far to the left (which was west) that its right fork pointed due north.

The right fork brought power from upstate New York and New England. The left fork brought it from three power plants along the Hudson River: Roseton, an oil-burning plant in Newburgh; Bowline, another oil-burning plant, twenty-six miles to the south; and Indian Point, a nuclear power plant on the other side (the east side) of the river. Left and right forks met in Millwood, like busy lanes of southbound traffic, and merged into a congested corridor of towers, power lines, and substations in the west-central Westchester towns of Pleasantville, Eastview, Sprain Brook, and Dunwoodie. South of Sprain Brook and Dunwoodie, the lines went underground.

So they argued: raised their voices, shook their heads, waved their arms, pointed fingers, as if they were hammering invisible nails.

And argued.

It is not anyone’s idea of a perfect system. If Con Edison had had more land at its disposal, it would have run its transmission lines over soil that was less rocky and therefore less resistant to electricity; it would have built more towers and put fewer circuits on each one. But Westchester is squeezed between the Hudson River, the southwest corner of Connecticut, and Long Island Sound. Land is expensive, wide-open space scarce. Rights-of-way are hard to come by.

They had strong feelings and opinions.

The stakes were high.

Lightning struck right in the middle of that corridor, at 8:37 in the evening, in the midst of a ferocious storm. It struck a tower carrying conductors between substations in Buchanan and Millwood, 345-kilovolt lines that supplied 1,200 megawatts of power from Roseton, Bowline, and Indian Point.

The arguments took some nasty turns.

It was New York.

It was July. It was 1977.

Many people were in sour moods to begin with.

2

In the city, around the time of that first bolt of lightning, knowing nothing of the storm in Westchester or the shape of the power grid or the responsibilities of a system operator or even the source of all the electricity—6,000 megawatts—they consumed on a summer night, people did the things that city people do.

Some talked.

Some walked.

Some waited for buses.

Many worked: in hot kitchens and hotter subway stations; in cool, quiet offices after hours; in fire stations and precinct houses; in factories and warehouses; in bridge and tunnel tollbooths; in hospitals, machine shops, hotels, and stores of all kinds.

Some hailed cabs. Some drove them.

Firemen fought fires; policemen fought all kinds of crime.

There were a few signs but no warnings, and except for a few operators and dispatchers at a few power plants, substations, and control centers, no one knew anything was wrong.

At around nine o’clock, the time of the second lightning strike, people watching television might have noticed the picture on their sets contract.

Not many of them thought anything of it.

Not even those who knew, as one Queens man knew, that a shrinking picture was a sign of either a failing TV tube or low voltage.

The Queens man had much more faith in his television than in Con Edison, and though critics of Con Edison were more common than hot-dog carts in midtown, few of them knew as much about electricity as he did. He was an electrical engineer, and from 1958 to 1964, the chief engineer of the city’s Bureau of Gas and Electricity.

People ate, on the late side: burgers and french fries; bagels, ribs, and baklava; pizza, plantains, and pork-fried rice; falafels, hot dogs, and shish kebabs; soggy soft pretzels and shaved ice; sausage bread on Arthur Avenue; striped bass in Astoria; dainty portions of veal and duck; oversize turkey-and-chopped-liver clubs.

The electrical engineer expected bad service and lame excuses from Con Edison, and he was rarely disappointed. In August 1959 a blackout had shut down the West Side from Columbus Circle to Columbia University, and a large part of the Upper East Side. Asked by the mayor to investigate, he found that the design of Con Edison’s grid was at fault: too few feeders from too few substations, increasing the likelihood that small problems would lead to large ones. He conducted similar investigations after the mid-Manhattan blackout of 1961 and the Brooklyn blackout of 1962.

Con Edison always blamed someone else, or something else.

The electrical engineer always blamed Con Ed.

Some drank their dinners, in a mostly futile effort to beat the heat: frozen daiquiris, tequila sunrises, White Russians, Black Russians, banshees, and margaritas; frosty mugs of beer chasing shots of whiskey; seven-ounce bottles called ponies; twenty-fivecent quarts.

Some uncorked fine wine; others twisted the tin tops off Boone’s Farm, Night Train, and Mad Dog 20/20.

When the lights went out in November 1965, the electrical engineer was in a tunnel beneath the East River on a Manhattanbound D train. The train rolled to a stop. Four hours later, when the train’s battery-powered emergency lights began to dim, he grabbed a trainman’s lantern, climbed out of the rear of the train, and walked back to the Brooklyn station. His fellow passengers spent another nine hours underground.

Some sat on rocks or rooftops in the heights of the outer boroughs, marveling at the Manhattan skyline. Others hurried out of the city’s big parks before dark, kicking soccer balls, bouncing basketballs, swinging golf clubs, tossing Frisbees and softballs, twirling bats like batons.

People sang in the shower. People played music in the street.

Some people prepared for bed. Others were already sleeping. Some people were married. Others decided to separate or get divorced. Thousands of people were out of work. Some of them pored over the classifieds; others found that work, for wages, was not the only way to get by.

The 1965 blackout began when a surge of power, well within normal operating range, tripped an improperly set relay at the Beck power plant in Queenston, Ontario. The tripped relay opened the circuit on one of five lines carrying 1.5 million kilowatts of electricity north and west into Canada. The other four circuits overloaded, and the power from Beck reversed itself, sending a massive jolt of electricity south into New York. The surge overwhelmed protective devices. One feeder failed, then another. Within ten minutes, New England Power and Con Edison knocked themselves out trying to fill upstate New York’s void.

Some listened to the game: the Yankees were in Milwaukee.

At Shea Stadium, twenty-two thousand watched the Mets.

Young men and women, in from Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey, shopped for secondhand jeans, records, rolling papers, and marijuana. Many danced: to funk, to country, to punk, to Israeli music at the 92nd Street Y, and most of all, to disco.

People looked for prostitutes; prostitutes looked for johns.

Some watched Baretta; others said, I’ve seen this one, before checking to see if anything else was on.

A relay in Canada, Con Edison said, caused the blackout.

Not quite, the electrical engineer replied. The relay certainly contributed to the blackout, but a precipitating event is not the same as a cause. A week after the blackout, he briefed reporters on the highlights of his twenty-two-page report. Con Edison, not Canada, was responsible for Con Edison’s troubles. The utility needed to learn how to free itself from neighboring utilities when they threatened its stability, and it needed to install automatic load-shedding equipment, which would help its engineers manage the available load once New York, or some significant part of it, was on its own.

People stepped off trains: at Grand Central, at 125th Street, at Fordham Road in the Bronx.

People snatched purses.

People stepped onto trains, as a Long Island couple did at Penn Station, a few minutes after nine. They’d tried to take the 5:04, but when they learned that it would be delayed by a tunnel fire, they opted for dinner at the Steel Palace and tennis: Billie Jean King and Virginia Wade, playing for the New York Apples. As the 9:20 to Manhasset pulled out, at 9:20, the Long Islanders congratulated themselves on their city savvy.

And people had their purses snatched.

At around nine o’clock, the picture on his television set contracted.

The electrical engineer didn’t think anything of it. Brownouts (tactical voltage reductions, intended to protect the system at times of extra-heavy usage) and mini-blackouts had become as much a part of summer in the city as smog. His lights often flickered and dimmed. It had been a 90-degree day, and it was a sultry