The weather report was now predicting variable overcast conditions preceding the storm moving up from Virginia. The overcast was responsible for more afternoon lights than usual being turned on in Manhattan. The operator, pushing himself back in the high, gray, luxurious chair at the center of the control room, glided quickly and deftly to the tracking ball control, his palm moving over it as blue and amber readouts on the computer screens told him backup alarms were about to ring. The indicator for the substation at West Forty-ninth and Vernon was flashing, overloaded at nine hundred megawatts, about to trip and set in motion a “brownout.” This was averted by the controller siphoning off extra power from feeder line eighty — the line which brought the hydro-power down from Canada. Still, overload threatened.
“If it goes above two thousand,” the controller called, “start shedding,” which for the men on the four-to-midnight watch meant that they weren’t to wait until substations started tripping out. “Call Kennedy, hospitals, medical, fire, ambulance — they’ll have to go to EGs.” But the Spets man knew that the controller didn’t suspect any crisis building up. He was merely taking strict precautionary measures, confident that Con Ed’s BJGs — backup jet generators — could kick in at a few moments’ notice if necessary. What the chief controller didn’t know, however, was that the jet-engine generators had over ten pounds of sand thrown into their innards. It had been as simple as a child throwing sand at a beach. The moment they kicked in, they’d overheat and burn out.
While the controller watched, alarm lights started to flash all over the circuit board.
Twenty-seven minutes later, the huge spillways of La Grande in Quebec exploded, causing massive flooding racing at unprecedented speed over the vast Canadian tundra. Feeder eighty and all other transmission lines from Quebec went dead. Four-point-seven minutes later both the nuclear plants at Indian Point reported explosions, not in the restricted rod pool area inside the plant but in the control rooms themselves. Six operators were dead — more than twenty critically injured.
Now, devoid of nuclear power, its hydro feeder and fossil-fuel generating plant capacity out, over 90 percent of New York City was plunged into darkness — only hospitals and control towers at LaGuardia and Kennedy functioning on their own emergency generators.
The lightning forked blue over New York so that at first New Yorkers believed the power lines and substations had been hit by the storm moving up from Virginia, and they blamed this for stopping everything from their TVs to the subway — over two million people caught in rush hour, the port loading facilities immobilized, auto accidents by the thousands, and in Flatbush, looting worse than during the blackout of 77.
In Mount Sinai and other hospitals from New York to New Jersey and in Westchester County, over forty-three patients died during the delays before emergency generators kicked in. At Bellevue a new orderly, eager to help, struck a match, creating a flashback along the oxygen feed line to an oxygen tank, which became a rocket, tearing through two walls and killing four elderly patients waiting to go into OR, and two more in the recovery room, the explosion also creating a massive fire. Oxygen feeds were quickly cut off to prevent other explosions, but this meant that dozens of emphysema patients, most elderly, went into respiratory distress, eleven of them dying despite heroic efforts under emergency battery lights to resuscitate them.
Ambulance crews did their best but were plagued by motor accidents, fourteen in Manhattan alone, which prevented them from responding to emergency walkie-talkie calls. Many civilians were struck down in Times Square as they were pushed off curbs by the sheer force of crowds panicking in response to the gunfire of a mugging at the corner of Forty-second and Broadway.
Two women were dragged off near Central Park West between West Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth and raped. One was left dead, her throat slit by her attacker. There were quiet, heroic actions too throughout the city, but these were isolated cases that couldn’t hope to arrest the war-spurred fear, which climaxed around 7:15 p.m. that evening when a radio station, broadcasting weakly but broadcasting nevertheless via its own emergency generator power, relayed a conversation with a ham radio operator claiming the police had found evidence of coordinated sabotage against the city. Furious, the mayor, having to drive through the terror-filled streets first to Con Ed’s ECC and then to the radio station, finally countered the report by announcing that he had been assured by Con Ed that the blackout was an “unusual confluence of forces” and that power would be restored as soon as possible.
Many people took refuge in churches, and some caught by the blackout near Fifth Avenue sought protection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. But nowhere was it totally safe, several people mugged in the western chapel of St. Patrick’s, while on Sixth Avenue a visitor to New York, driving north, took a right onto Fifty-seventh Street, and was sideswiped twice before being hit and killed by a city garbage truck, the accident creating a solid traffic jam four blocks east to Lexington.
While most others had been heading home when the power went out, some had been on their way back to work in the New York Port Authority’s convoy-coordinating center in Trade Tower One when the power went out, and found themselves trapped on an elevator between the sixtieth and sixty-first floors. All telephone lines were out, the only news being relayed by the emergency-generator-run radio stations, the mayor’s assurance sounding thinner by the minute, with one station reporting heavy gunfire in Flatbush between blacks and “Little Seoul,” and several shootings in the Midtown Tunnel.
By 8:17 p.m. the New York radio stations operating on their own power had grown to half a dozen, their lights, like those of the hospitals, pinpoints of illumination in the canyons of darkness, several more stations broadcasting unconfirmed reports of sabotage against the feeder lines coming through Westchester County and from the East Rockies mountain grid. The mayor did what he could to disavow these rumors as well, and indeed several of the stations refused to run them, but those that did were no longer relying on the unconfirmed reports of ham radio operators but on FM “Radio du Canada” broadcasts out of Montreal and CBC stations in Toronto, picked up by truckers on the interstates from Chicago to the Adirondacks. The mayor again appealed for calm. “Now’s the time,” he told the population of eleven million, “for New Yorkers to stick together.”
For the most part they did, but the widespread random acts of violence had not yet abated, and by the time the mayor returned to City Hall he was already trying to compute the political costs to him of having told a barefaced lie earlier on, having dismissed the rumors of sabotage as “patent nonsense.” One of his aides told him that he was wanted on the phone.
“Better be the president of Con Ed!” His Honor snapped.
“No, sir. It’s the president of the United States.”
The mayor held his hand over the receiver for a moment to compose himself. “Mr. President?”
The president’s voice was competing with static on the radio telephone. “Mr. Mayor. I’m sending Al Trainor up to see you.”
The mayor wasn’t sure what to say. What he needed was electricity — and fast — not presidential aides. “Well, Mr. President, he won’t be able to…” His voice disappeared in the sound of an enormous explosion and a ball of crimson flame curling in on itself, followed by the sound of crashing glass. A chopper, all but out of gas, had tried for a last-minute landing atop one of the skyscraper pads, but instead, buffeted by wind shear into the darkness, the pilot momentarily disorientated in the pitch black night, a rotor had hit the water tank.