Blackout of ’03
I made this composite of Nasa’s before and after satellite images, so as to give a better side-by-side comparison.
I was, of course, in the office when it happened. The phone cut off, and the metal halide lamps that provide much of the light flickered and went off. It took a second to realize that all the power had gone out, and I went running to the server room: the UPSes are there more as a guard against brownouts, not a full-scale blackout, and I had to make sure the important boxes went down cleanly before the batteries ran out. One thing to change in the future: the KVM should be on a lightly loaded UPS, not a heavily loaded one. I did manage to make sure shutdown happened on the boxes that needed it, and the rest could happily fsck’ed themselves back to health.
Our phone system was on UPS, and continued to run for, as far as I can tell, the next two hours. There were various phone calls coming in and going out: the Upper West Side was blacked out, so was Midtown and Queens, and someone saw some smoke down by the 14th Street Con Ed plant. OK, so it’s a city-wide thing. One of our sales guys is up in Boston, and he relayed what CNN was reporting on his TV: large sections of the Northeast and Canada were out.
There was a company meeting scheduled later that day, and we held it early in abbreviated form. On the way to the conference room, someone remarked that no one had yet mentioned the T-word, and I thought of the plume of smoke seen coming from the Con Ed plant. By the end of the meeting, we heard the first news reports that the outage seemed to originate in the Mohawk-Niagra area, or maybe Canada. Just a blackout, though a big one.
I was one of the last ones to leave the building. I walked along West Street with a coworker who also lived in the Upper West Side. The plan was to hitch a ride from a friendly motorist; in the worst case, walking along the river seemed a much better idea than walking up the middle of Manhattan. But, remarkably, before we saw any friendly motorist, we caught an empty cab a bit past Rector Street. It looked like we’d have a ride uptown instead of the six mile hike.
The cabdriver was a surly asshole. We cut east a bit past Houston Street in an attempt to avoid the accumulating jam on West Street, as cars nosed into the arteries haphazardly with the traffic lights out of order. A half dozen people asked if we were heading uptown, and the driver very deliberately ignored them, moving forward off just as we answered that we were heading uptown. He claimed to be sticking by the taxi rule book, about making more pickups while the fare was running. Clearly, he was ignoring the extraordinary situation and the people in need of a ride. The one time we managed to pick someone up was on Sixth Avenue (after going further east looking for a less crowded uptown route), around 18th Street. This was a friend of my coworkers, who had volunteered to direct traffic, and was now heading home. Some cops had passed by, told him to keep up the good work, and gave him an orange hazard vest to wear. He later passed the vest off to another volunteer directing traffic around 23rd Street, who’d need the vest more than my coworker’s friend would need a souvenier.
We gave up on the cab shortly after that. Traffic was going nowhere, and walking seemed like a better option. I believed the jam would clear up after Herald’s Square, where Broadway’s diagonal cut always caused traffic backups; my coworker and the cab driver thought it went all the way up Manhattan. When we walked past 34th Street a bit later, the traffic was much clearer on Sixth Avenue, but, really, I didn’t see how we’d be able to get to Sixth Avenue in a reasonably time in the first place.
Along the way, restaurant and cafe owners were selling sandwiches for a buck each, now that their refrigeration was gone. It was dinner time, and they, the souvlaki guys, and people ad hoc selling cool drinks on the street were doing big business. In particular, the Mr. Softee trucks had long, long lines of people wanting ice cream in the heat; might as well sell it all — there probably were no working freezers back at the Mr. Softee mother ship. Lots of beverages, too, from the standard Poland Springs bottles to open containers of beer. In this suddenly unreal world, the cops had better things to do than give tickets for that sort of quality of life offense. And the mood, while not festive in Midtown, was on the jovial, good natured side. After all, we weren’t fleeing from a smouldering hole in the ground.
Around 50th Street, a cop directing traffic had directed a Jaguar over to the side for some reason, and this woman from the car marched up to the cop and started yelling at him. Red in the face from the heat, he was in no mood for this sort of nonsense, but he did try to calmly, professional tell her that the city was in a bit of a situation. We didn’t stay around to see if this altercation ended civilly or with handcuffs.
There was a cluster of people gathered around the Fox News zipper on Sixth, watching the somewhat useless news. Yes, a good part of the Northeast was blacked out, and officials had ruled out terrorism. Then the Fox News self-advertisements came on, and we continued walking.
The Park was a bit of a shortcut. You can take the loop up from Sixth Avenue up to West 72nd Street and save a few blocks. You could also see the tourists in the horse-drawn carriages, aware that something big was going on but either insistent in continuing with the New York Experiences or aware that the carriages were one of the better ways to get around the city. My coworker continued walking through the Park — it was much more pleasant than the street, even if the street didn’t have many cars — but I headed west at that point. The lamps by the Dakota’s entrance were lit. In a touch of Gilded Age elegance, they’ve maintained these lamps as gaslights, and they were on the only lights on the street.
I passed by small knots of people gathered near cars, listening to the news on the radio. I walked up Broadway, and saw that Fairway and Citarella’s were closed; we saw them clearing out their dairy and fish sections the next day, and heard that Zabar’s was selling off crates of perishables for a buck or two. Big Nick’s was still up and running, with the tourists at the hotel around the corner overflowing into the outdoor dining area — plastic chairs and tables underneath the construction scaffolding. I guess they were using up their supply of meat.
Grace was sitting outside the apartment building, since there was reception on her cell phone there. The doorman and super had candles lit by the staircases, and volunteers eventually put out glow-sticks on the landings. Grace’s penlights, made for constricting patient’s pupils during physicals, proved handy, as we had a candle-lit salad dinner made out of our fridge’s perishables. Plus ice cream for dessert. Extra ice cream and mochi went to the doorman and the super’s kids.
We listened to NPR on a Walkman’s radio. Later that evening, the mayor said he expected Con Ed to start turning power back on sometime after 1AM. At around 6AM, the Upper West Side was lit. We took the crowded bus down to near Penn Station at around 8AM, and found spotty power all along the way. Parts of Midtown were lit, but we didn’t see traffic lights south of 42nd Street along Fifth Avenue. Penn Station was dark, and there were suburban commuters still sleeping on the steps of the Post Office as we headed back uptown on the free bus service. I forget what we had for lunch, but for dinner we took the safe route and had pasta with jar sauce.
I got the call that power had been restored to the office building around 5:30PM, and headed to the office to turn on the computers, since some of the project teams needed to be up that weekend; no rest for the sysadmin even on what was a giant snow day in August. Grace came with me, and we didn’t find an empty cab on Broadway. Grace thought we might have more luck on the East Aide, and the crosstown bus was right there. Sure enough, we caught a cab on Fifth Avenue near 79th Street.
The East Side didn’t have power then. It was one of the few times I listened to the tape recorded admonitions to put on the seat belt in the cab, since the driver made disturbingly daring dashes across the avenues, where cars came at a steady pace instead of clusters; there were no traffic lights to keep them in manageable bursts. We eventually made it to the FDR and it was a smooth ride down to Battery Park. The cab driver said that he had to go up to Connecticut to fill his tank, because all the gas pumps in the city were dead.
The main elevators in the building weren’t working, but the maintenance staff was there, and someone took us up the freight elevator. The computers started without too much of a problem — a couple of the Sun boxes required manually fsck, and had to wait until Monday because I didn’t feel like finding the right serial cables to get console — and we got home before dark. The cab ride home Friday evening was much smoother than the day before’s.
I didn’t take any pictures of the Blackout of ’03; I didn’t have my digital camera with me. Gothamist had the best pictures I’ve seen on the blogs, though I didn’t look at too many sites. Entertainingly, the ninth picture, of the older man directing traffic at 14th and 6th, is my coworkers friend that we picked up on the cab ride north.
Today, Slate has an interesting article on the LBL’s energy pricing/capacity charts. The LBL’s chart archives show how close each of the recorded regions got to peak carrying capacity. The NYS chart for August 14 shows NYS’s actual load drop to the floor right when the
blackout hits.
Oh, I finally got around to ordering LED flashlights to keep around the apartment and in the car for emergencies. Now I have to find one of those crank-powered radios on Ebay.