Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [98]
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.
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"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