Darkness and Fear in New York: On the Great Blackout of 1977

July 13, 1977, began as a fairly routine evening for New York City residents. Life in the huge metropolis went on as usual: the restaurants and cafes in Greenwich Village were buzzing with life, actors recited monologues on the theater stages, people ate dinner and watched TV. They did not imagine that the next morning nothing would be as it was.

New York's electricity company, Con Edison, only produced a relatively small portion of the electricity it supplies to the city. It is difficult to build power plants in the heart of the dense metropolis, and Con Edison preferred to purchase a significant part of the electricity supply from distant stations and conduct it into the city on long power lines.
At 8.37:XNUMX in the evening, lightning struck one of those power lines that feed the city. Lightning protection systems are installed on all the lines, but precisely on this line the system failed - and the current stopped. A few minutes later, in an unfortunate coincidence, another lightning strike struck two other power lines. In one of them the defense system worked properly. In the second - no.
Power consumption is measured in watts. A standard incandescent light bulb, for example, consumes 60 watts every second. New York City's electricity consumption that evening was 5800 million watts, or 5800 megawatts. The two power lines that fell due to the lightning strikes were supposed to deliver several hundred megawatts, but now all the other lines had to share the burden of supplying the electricity. The strength of the currents in the power lines began to approach dangerously close to the limit of the cables' transmission capacity.
And then...again a lightning strike, in the same area! The impact paralyzed a large power plant and took it out of the game.

It was now nine in the evening and engineers in Con Edison's control center were beginning to grasp the magnitude of the trouble they were in. In less than half an hour, New York lost about half of its external electricity supply - but none of the city's residents had a clue. The air conditioners, lamps and stoves continued to consume electricity at their regular rate.
Con Edison had a lifeline: the New York power grid was connected to power grids in New Jersey, Long Island, and New England. The connection between them allowed the networks to back each other up and increase the electricity supply if necessary.
But this was no longer a routine reinforcement. Greater New York was starved of energy and the few power lines left to it could not satisfy the hunger of the mighty monster. It began to thirstily drink enormous amounts of energy from the neighboring grids, each of which had to satisfy the needs of its own residents as well. None of them had the ability to handle the sudden load. Con Edison was, in effect, a heavyweight that threatened to drown all the other electric companies around it.

Panicked phone calls from the control rooms of the other power companies began pouring into Con Edison's control room. They all had the same demand: cut off the power to New York now, or we'll do it for you.
But no one can make a decision to lower the billboard to the largest city in the United States without considering it carefully. As an interim solution, Con Edison engineers began reducing the voltage reaching the city by eight percent. Unfortunately for them, nature intervened and established facts on the ground.

At nine twenty lightning struck again, fourth in number, and paralyzed another high voltage line. New Jersey and New England's automatic protection systems did what they had to do to keep their power grids from crashing: they cut off power to New York. Now only Long Island was left alone in the campaign, and her engineers had no choice. They disconnected Con Edison from the grid, and the city of New York, for all its eight million inhabitants, plunged into darkness.

This was not New York's first blackout. Twelve years earlier, in 1965, there had been a massive blackout across the northeastern United States. New Yorkers remembered this blackout with nostalgic fondness as an event that united all the residents of the Big Apple and brought out the best in them. Neighbors helped each other. People handed out drinks and sweets to each other. Energetic residents went down to the intersections and started directing the traffic voluntarily. Fraternity and mischief prevailed everywhere.

But the New York of 1977 was not the New York of 1965. In 1977, the city was in a severe economic crisis, and unemployment levels were among the highest in its history. The social pressures that developed in the black and poor neighborhoods built steadily over the years and the frustration of the weaker classes had nowhere to escape. Brotherhood and evil were not in their lexicon.
There was another difference between the two power outages - perhaps even the most significant difference. The blackout of 1965 happened in the afternoon, while the one of 1977 happened at night.

In the better areas of the city, the residents accepted the power outage in a good spirit. In Greenwich Village, for example, the streets turned into an impromptu festival and restaurant owners handed out free glasses of champagne. In one of the theater performances, the actors proved that the show must go on and ended the performance by candlelight.
In Brooklyn, the Bronx and Harlem the picture was completely different. Crowds stormed the shops, broke the shop windows and looted everything nearby. Young people tore down the window bars of jewelry stores and emptied them. Fifty new Pontiacs were stolen from a car dealership. Hundreds of buildings were set on fire. Frightened families threw some clothes into the trunks of their cars, and fled the neighborhoods.
The police were helpless. They were in a considerable minority: ten thousand wearing uniforms against tens of thousands of rioters, and they also saw nothing. When the police entered one store to stop the looters, ten nearby stores were robbed at the same moment.

When the sun rose the next day, the city was shrouded in smoke from over a thousand fires. 4500 people were arrested. An old prison was reopened only to house the thousands of detainees. The immediate damages to businesses were estimated at sixty million dollars. The indirect damage to the economy is estimated at about one billion dollars. The grim reality of a city torn and divided that one night without electricity was enough to throw it into the arms of chaos was exposed for all to see. Electricity returned to the city about twenty-five hours later, but in that short time New York had become a dark, dangerous and cold-hearted city.

The article is taken from the podcast: 'Making history!'- a bi-weekly program about science, technology and history