Read an Excerpt
Blackout
By James Goodman North Point Press
Copyright © 2003 James Goodman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2806-9
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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 night. There had been scattered electrical storms. Every air conditioner in the city was running on high.
The lights flickered. He didn't even get up from his chair.
Two dozen people stood in line outside a reasonably priced Italian restaurant.
A famous critic had recently raved about the food.
In newspaper offices and television and radio studios, people gathered the latest news.
The president defended his opposition to federal funding for health clinics that performed abortions even if it meant that only well-to-do women would have the right to choose.
Life, he said, isn't always fair.
Residents of Rockwood, Tennessee, returned to their homes a day after an overturned truck released a cloud of bromide gas. National guardsmen patrolled to prevent looting. Government officials said that one-third of the trucks on the highways were unsafe; without more inspectors and stiffer penalties, there would be horrible disasters.
At around nine-thirty, subway motormen began to report trouble with the signals, the red, amber, and green lights that help ensure a safe distance between trains.
Some were flickering.
Others were out.
There was no pattern to the outages, nor obvious meaning.
The supervisor on duty at the Transit Authority's subway command center had heard nothing from Con Edison.
People went to mass; people went to minyan.
People played mahjong; people played bingo.
Sharpies played three-card monte with two or three shills, each of whom won hand after hand.
Tourists saw fistfuls of twenties, and on the cardboard-box card table they thought they saw the red queen the sharpies seemed to work so hard to hide. They put down twenties of their own, and lost them every single time.
Some complained about the heat; others said, "Why complain, you can't change it."
People played bridge, and people took bribes.
The subway supervisor, who had worked for the Transit Authority for twenty-nine years, had been on duty for his share of difficult nights and days, including the rush hour in November 1965 when the lights went out with half a million people underground.
He had also seen his share of changes, particularly since 1965.
The trains were ancient, covered with graffiti, and horribly maintained. Stations were menacing: dilapidated, filthy, dark, and dreary. Panhandlers were everywhere. Ridership was way down.
But at the moment, with the signals on the blink, the city's curse was a supervisor's blessing. There were only forty-five thousand people on 175 trains along 714 miles of track.
A few people hid from Son of Sam.
Many people worried about him, including two sixteen-year-olds who, spooked by their own speculation about the serial killer at an eerie moment just before dark, decided to return to their Co-op City apartments. They had to pass through a long walkway in the center of a shopping plaza; after sunset, it was like a tunnel without lights.
"He's in there!" one of them cried.
"But we're not with boys," the other said.
"And we're not in a car."
"And who comes to Co-op City, anyway?"
They took no chances. They pulled their bell-bottoms up to high-water level; drew their sweatshirt hoods around their heads until only their noses showed; locked arms; and walked with their stomachs sticking out as far as their stomachs would go.
Lots of people smoked pot; people with lots of money snorted coke.
"I could see it coming," said the supervisor, "from the first reports of temporary loss of power." There were too many for it to be a coincidence.
He did something he'd never done — something no one, as far as he knew, had ever done in seventy-three years of subway service. He asked dispatchers to ask the motormen on all 175 trains to proceed to the nearest station and stop there.
People opened fire hydrants.
People swam in pools.
People worked for wages despite welfare rules.
Children ran under sprinklers; others played war with water guns to keep cool.
Parents kissed kids good night; people who hardly knew each other screwed. Women waited in line for ladies' rooms; men walked right in and pissed.
The Transit Authority supervisor may have wondered why Con Edison had not warned him. But he had no reason to feel left out of the loop.
The police knew nothing. The fire department knew nothing. The mayor knew nothing.
The chairman of Con Edison himself knew nothing.
He had just finished dinner, at home in Bronxville. His workday was over. Despite the heat and the staggering demand, the system was humming along. He was on his way into the den.
Some shot heroin. Some shot hoops.
Some ran from the police.
Some studied: for summer school, for the real-estate-licensing exam, for the LSATs.
Some stiffed waiters; some left huge tips.
Some burned abandoned buildings for landlord's cash.
Some burned them for kicks.
The chairman had come to Con Edison from LBJ's Department of the Interior in the shakeup after November 1965. The design of the system and much of the equipment, he immediately discovered, were outdated. Service was spotty. Management was cumbersome, with too much weight at the top. Con Edison was a company customers loved to hate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blackout by James Goodman. Copyright © 2003 James Goodman. Excerpted by permission of North Point Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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