The Disaster That Wasn't
THE NORTHEAST
(See Cover)
In the crisp, clear air 33,000 ft. over Pennsylvania, United Airlines Pilot Dale Chapman blinked in disbelief. There, one moment, were the myriad lights of Manhattan winking in the distance like diamonds on a jeweler's velvet cloth. An instant later, there was only blackness. "The whole city of New York was missing," marveled Chapman. "It looked like the end of the world."
For Lufthansa Pilot Reinhard Noethel, bringing in a 707 jetliner from Cologne at 39,000 ft., it was the same story--almost. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced on the intercom, "on the left side you can see Boston." Noethel looked out the left side and gasped. "All I could see," he said later, "were some blue lights."
By then, a silent avalanche of night had engulfed most of the Northeast. Cascading west, south and east from the Niagara Falls region, the electronic eclipse swept over an area only slightly smaller than Great Britain: 80,000 sq. mi., embracing parts of eight U.S. states and most of Canada's Ontario province. In 12 bewildering minutes--in less time than it would take an intercontinental missile to reach the U.S. from Russia -30 million people were plunged into blackness and bewilderment. And, in a society that has peered at the moon's hidden face and unlocked the secrets of matter, its origins seemed as impenetrable as the great blackout itself.
Squiggly Lines. The first hint that the Northeast's huge CANUSE (for Canadian-U.S. Eastern interconnection) power grid was in trouble came at 5:16 p.m. Moving clockwise, millions of kilowatts of electricity were coursing through the vast network of cables to meet the early-evening needs of the Western Hemisphere's most heavily populated, most power-dependent region. In the humming central control room of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, ink pens tracing the flow of power suddenly shuddered. At the Rochester Gas & Electric Corp. on the other side of Lake Ontario, the dials on a wall lurched out of control.
A minute later, meters at the mammoth $737 million Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant--biggest in the hemisphere--also went wild. The power output surged from 1,500 megavolts to 2,250, then sank abruptly to zero. "The needle came clear off the paper!" exclaimed one engineer. "There were more squiggly lines than in an earthquake." Giant generators spun uncontrollably out of step, and overload switches sprang open.
Orange Scintilla. A few pinpoints of light shone through the all-enveloping shroud. Many areas of Vermont, with nearly 30 individual utility companies, withstood the tide. New Hampshire went black in only two heavily populated western sections. The Lake Placid, N.Y., resort area was saved by the grandiloquently named Paul Smith's Electric Light & Power & Railroad Co. A local generator kept New Haven, Conn., aglow. Such isolated Massachusetts communities as Holyoke, Braintree and Taunton never lost a watt, and windswept Nantucket Island, 30 miles off Cape Cod, kept going with a private power system installed in 1889.
One New Yorker saw what was coming. At Consolidated Edison's Energy Control Center on Manhattan's West Side, Engineer Edwin Nellis was monitoring a meter that records the amount of power flowing in from upstate sources. At 5:18, the 300,000-kw. influx reversed; in seconds, 1.5 million kw. were surging northward, draining the city at its moment of peak demand. Before Nellis could halt the outflow by cutting Con Ed off from CANUSE, lights began flickering all over the city until only a scintilla of orange glowed from each bulb. For an instant, the lights surged on again; and then, like a theater at curtain time, New York sank into darkness.
Blindman's Buff. Man has always held the night in terror--from Homer's day, when the warriors in the Iliad besought Zeus to "deliver from darkness the sons of the Achaeans," through Biblical times, when God's direst threat was to "set darkness upon thy land," right down to the present, on those rare occasions when he encounters it.
Even so, New Yorkers assailed by chill night--and, for a frozen instant, silence--reacted almost sportively, as if it were all a gigantic game of blindman's buff. In soaring office buildings and fetid subway tunnels, beleaguered commuter trains and jampacked terminals, they joked and chattered, waiting from minute to minute for the reviving whine of dynamos, the first stutter of returning light. And, incredulously, they began to realize at last that they had been transported to Caliban's world, a vast, trackless cave without warmth or wheels, without hot food or the lights of home.
As 630 subway trains gasped to a halt, 800,000 passengers were trapped in them. In hundreds of stalled elevators, office workers hung tremulously between earth and sky. Traffic lights failed; main arteries snarled. Hundreds of drivers ran out of gas--only to discover that service-station pumps cannot work without electricity. Apartment buzzers summoned nobody. Most vending machines became inoperable. Fire alarms were mute. At the United Nations, earphones and tape recorders went dead, leaving bewildered delegates --for the first time in memory--with the refreshing experience of having nothing to say and no one to listen to.
Betrayed. Seldom had Americans been more aware of their dependence on machines. When power failed in the $37,500 Queens home of Mechanical Engineer Edwin Robbins, the result was pure farce. Nothing worked, not the multitone door chimes or the intercom system, not the Danish dining-room chandelier or the bedroom clocks, not the hair dryer or the electric blankets, not the can opener or the carving knife, not the toothbrush or the razor. Not even the electric-eye garage door. For dinner, the Robbinses had charcoal-broiled steaks grilled over a primitive backyard barbecue.
To Americans served and shielded by machines at every turn, each silent switch and powerless push button was a taunt. Two of modern technology's paramount deities--the dynamo and the digital computer--had defected simultaneously. Yet Northeasterners wasted little time lamenting their betrayal by the machine. Instead, with a high sense of shared adventure, they set about the unfamiliar task of using legs and arms to help themselves and their fellow men. If in the process the 20th century American learned belatedly to mistrust the complex mechanics by which he lives, he also acquired new faith in his humanity.
Deprived of power for their milking machines, resourceful farmers hooked the machines to tractor motors to keep their bellowing herds happy. Vermont housewives with refrigerators full of thawing food calmly transferred everything to a more capacious freezer--the backyard. In the fireplaces of $40,000 suburban homes, paunchy businessmen crouched to kindle damp charcoal and concoct Boy Scout mulligan stew.
Surrogate Cops. The Harvard football team lined up autos along the practice field to light an extra few hours of jousting for the weekend's game against Brown. Students at New York's Fordham University studied by car lights; a Springfield, Vt., barber finished cutting a customer's hair when an obliging motorist focused his car on the barbershop's front window; in New York's Pennsylvania Station, homeless commuters sacked out in the glow of two Volkswagens' headlights.
At unlighted intersections throughout the blacked-out area, countless volunteers--many of them college students --took over the job of directing traffic. (In Manhattan, the most prominent surrogate cops were a brown-robed Franciscan friar and an elderly boulevardier in a dinner jacket.) Acting on their own, men and youths patrolled neighborhood stores to prevent looting.
Harvard Sociologist (The Lonely Crowd) David Riesman had an explanation for man's new humanity to man. "When something like this happens," he said, "it's not our fault and we know it's not. So we say to ourselves, 'Fate is in charge,' and we enter into an era of good feeling. That's what happened Tuesday night."
To many, the mood of New York evoked memories of wartime London, when Englishmen of all classes closed ranks before the common foe, the shared indignity. In the blackout, as in the blitz, no man was an island. A blanket on the ground, as Henry Moore recorded in his drawings of Londoners huddled in air-raid shelters, can be a great leveler. To complete the parallel, blacked-out U.S. cities were illumed by what Englishmen still remember as "a bomber's moon."
Uncommitted Crime. In Albany, teen-agers with transistor radios went from house to house advising residents to turn off appliances. The people of Burlington, Vt., in response to a prankster's plea aired by a local radio station, took 200 flashlights to De Goesbriand Memorial Hospital--where the lights only dimmed momentarily.
Predictably, not everyone behaved so nobly. At Walpole State Prison outside Boston, 320 maximum-security prisoners went on a mindless rampage that cost $75,000 in damage, took four hours, 100 state troopers and clouds of tear gas to quell. But many rumors of criminal behavior turned out to be false.
Rochester's radio station WHAM broad cast unverified reports of wholesale looting in the heavily Negro sections where the bloody, three-day riots occurred in July 1964. Squads of police rushed into the area, found only a few broken windows.
Most astonishing of all to cynical New Yorkers was the catalogue of crimes and disasters that never happened. Only two citizens lost their lives as a result of the blackout: one fell down a stairway and struck his head; another died of a heart attack after climbing ten flights of stairs. There were one-fourth as many arrests as on a normal night. Despite darkened department stores, few shoplifters were active. "We can't do much business in the dark, but neither can the shoplifter," said Macy's President David Yunich.
Latter-Day O'Learys. At first, many thought the darkness came from within. A middle-aged executive who had been playing a too-vigorous game of basketball wondered if the fading light before his eyes signaled a massive coronary. A waiter who had just been inoculated against hay fever had a moment of terror. "Zap!" he thought. "Wrong vaccine." In Manhattan, a Negro maid looked out the window, told her employer to come on over and see "all the lights going out in tribute to Dorothy Kilgallen."
Scores concluded that, like latter-day Mrs. O'Learys, they were personally to blame for the blackout. After trimming the ends of some loose wires in readiness for the house painters next day, a Manhattan housewife saw the whole city go black and gasped: "What have I done now?" A small boy in Conway, N.H., whacked a telephone pole with a stick, saw night descend, and raced home weeping to his mother.
See-Throughs Y. Breakthroughs. Rumors flew wildly. On the beleaguered 4:55 to Croton-on-Hudson, a New York Central conductor cried: "Some Commie's pulled the switch from here to Canada!" Sabotage was on many minds. "You can't blame me." a Cuban U.N. official assured a U.S. delegate when the lights blew. "I was right here all the time." Some New Yorkers, claiming that they had seen a satellite pass over at the moment the lights failed, argued that the Russians had done it again. Many clung stubbornly to the belief that it was all a Government-ordered test to see if Americans could stand up to an air raid.
Women's Wear Daily, which is more authoritative about see-throughs than breakthroughs, came up with the farthest-out rumor of all. The blackout, it said, was caused by the test of a super-secret Pentagon weapon called "Fireball," whose object was to draw all available power from New York, divide it into two beams and shoot it into space. "The point at which the two incredibly powerful beams crossed," the paper explained, "would become a mammoth burst of artificial lightning and would presumably destroy any enemy missiles within range."
The rumors were nonsensical--but reality also smacked of absurdity. In Central Park, a stroller looked up and for a magic moment imagined that the darkling towers beyond the trees were medieval ramparts. The murky streets looked like a blend of pagan ritual and July-Fourth celebration, as thousands groped about with matches, candles, flashlights, even makeshift torches of burning newspaper.
Dancing in the Aisles. The city's ponderous machinery rose to the occasion with unaccustomed swiftness. Mayor Robert Wagner, seeing the lights go out as he drove up the East Side, alerted his Emergency Control Board with his limousine phone. The Police Department, its communications and operations rooms lit by auxiliary power, summoned 5,000 men back to duty, had a force of 15,000 on hand before the long night ended. Because the alarm system was disconnected, the Fire Department sent trucks lumbering through the streets looking for fires. On orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, 7,000 National Guardsmen reported for duty, and some 5,000 civil defense workers also pitched in.
The most pressing problem was to rescue all the people trapped in subways and elevators. A few women fainted, and there were some hysteria cases, but most of the imprisoned straphangers rose to the occasion. Aboard one train, a man who called himself Lord Echo got everybody to join him in calypso songs; two hours later, astonished rescuers found 50 passengers dancing in the aisles. Under the East River, 350 passengers had to slog to safety through mud, water and scurrying rats.
In the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge, high above the inky East River, 1,700 passengers in two trains were suspended like riders on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel. "The wind would blow," said Mary Cronin Doyle, 18, "and the train would sway, and then some woman would scream." It took police five hours to assist everybody across a precarious, 11-in.-wide catwalk running 35 ft. from the train tracks to the bridge's roadway. All told, 2,000 trapped passengers preferred to wait it out--including 60 who spent 14 hours in a stalled train under the East River.
Sartre & Peale. Rescue workers had to break through walls in at least three skyscrapers to get to elevator shafts and release some 75 passengers. One man trapped in an RCA Building elevator for 20 hours gave his three companions a course in yoga positions--including standing on his head. At the Empire State Building when a rescue team finally broke through, one of its members solicitously inquired, "Are there any pregnant women aboard?" Shot back a male voice: "Why, we've hardly even met!"
The blackout tried everyone's resources--and few would admit defeat. In stalled elevators and trains, passengers improvised games, including one whose object was to suggest the unlikeliest partners for stalled elevator cars (samples: Jean-Paul Sartre and Norman Vincent Peale; Defense Secretary McNamara and a draft-card burner; any Con Edison executive and any New York housewife). Trapped office workers improvised candles with copies of Book Week and rubber cement.
Candlepower. More than anything else, candlepower saved the day. On Wall Street, a man from Merrill Lynch dropped in at Our Lady of Victory Church, left a generous contribution, and made off with all the votive candles. At the U.N., Secretary-General U Thant worked for five hours with light from candles that, joked an aide, were "left over from the Pope's visit"--then led a procession of eight to the ground, 38 stories below, by candlelight. Housewife Harriette Browne hated to do it, but she had to use the 48 candles from her husband's birthday cake to light the house. One Fifth Avenue jeweler credited the sale of a $6,500 brooch to candlelight. "It does give such an attractive glow to diamonds," he purred. At Irishman Jim Downey's, a celebrated steak house, the light came from Jewish yahrzeit candles, normally used to commemorate the dead. The New York Hilton used 30,000 candles during the long night. So great was the demand that Ajello's candle shop in midtown sold fancy bayberry models at $7.50 a pair--though there were no takers for the 90-lb., hand-dipped model for $150. To make the occasion complete, Mrs. Anthony Ajello, wife of the candlestick maker, had a baby boy in the midst of the blackout--by candlelight, of course.
There was some profiteering. Streetcorner "salesmen" hawked candles for 500 and even $1 apiece, flashlights for three and four times their regular prices. Small boys charged apartment dwellers 100 a floor to lead them up murky stairways. Worst of all were the cabbies, who seemed intent on making enough to retire the very next day. Many hackies charged--and got--up to $50 for a $15 ride.
Rushed Ice. At many of the city's hospitals, auxiliary generators quickly conked out--or were not available to begin with. At Bellevue, sewage began to back up into the basement when pumps failed, finally reached a level of H in. Police, firemen and volunteers rushed dry ice to hospitals to keep stored blood from spoiling, sent generators to those that needed them, rigged electrical heart-pacer machines to auxiliary power, and hand-pumped iron lungs. A delicate corneal transplant, a five-hour craniotomy, and a caesarean section were performed under light from makeshift sources; five dozen babies were delivered.
The worst potential hazard was in the air, where at peak hours, between 5 and 9 p.m., some 200 planes from all over the world home in on New York's Kennedy International Airport. American Airlines' Flight 6, four hours and 25 minutes out of Los Angeles with 80 passengers aboard, was only two miles from touchdown when the runway lights dimmed and disappeared. Turning toward the ocean, Captain Gus Konz lost radio contact with the tower, which by that time was operating on fast-fading emergency power. Unable to contact Kennedy, Konz pointed the nose of the 248,000-lb. plane westward and minutes later set down at Newark Airport.
Slender Thread. Luckily for Konz and his New York-bound fellow pilots, it was a sparkling night, and they could see one another hovering over the darkened city. "You know, we're living on a very slender thread," he said. "If the weather had been bad instead of extremely good, there could have been a disaster."
Inbound flights were diverted to airports as far away as Cleveland and Bermuda. Philadelphia received 40 New York-bound airliners carrying some 4,500 passengers. Said William T. Burns, Philadelphia's assistant city commerce director for aviation: "It's incredible if they don't have something similar to our emergency lighting system." Incredible as it was, Kennedy Airport did not. It was shut down for eleven hours and 55 minutes.
On the ground, merely getting fed and bedded down were the paramount problems. At B. Altman's department store, 500 late shoppers and employees dined on Russian caviar, specially blended coffee and other exotics from the imported-delicacies department. Few others ate that well. At Bloomingdale's, men and women slept in the home-furnishings and medical departments. Restaurants and bars did a booming business--though many rely on electricity to make their ice, pump their water, cook their food, wash the dishes, count the receipts, and of course light the premises.
Two Secretaries. Within minutes of the blackout, practically every hotel room in town was taken, and hotel lobbies, office couches and National Guard armories quickly filled with refugees. Some 80,000 stranded commuters slept in cavernous railroad stations. At Grand Central, one man was determined to get something more comfortable than a marble bench. "Kind of jokingly, I suggested he take a sleeper to Detroit on our Wolverine Express," said Ticket Seller Fred Hopkins. "So what does he do but buy a ticket!" An executive who was stuck in his 32nd-floor office with two attractive secretaries tried to sleep there--but his wife phoned every 15 minutes throughout the night. Thousands curled up in church pews--and at St. Patrick's Cathedral discovered to their dismay that there are no rest rooms. "We've been sending people over to the New Weston Hotel for 80 years," said Msgr. Thomas McGovern.
Some of those who finally made it home felt like Odysseus. One man hiked 15 miles from Wall Street to the East Bronx. Another had his wife sail their Chris-Craft 30 miles down the Hudson to pick him up at the 79th Street marina. A dozen passengers crossed the East River to Queens in the back of an armored car; aboard a flatbed truck, threescore executives toting attache cases jounced happily home across the 59th Street bridge.
A Dream? The streets were full of happy drunks, but even those who had not touched a drop seemed high--gripped by a crisis-born spirit of camaraderie and exhilaration. In Brooklyn, a meat market donated a whole pig to a neighboring convent, thus providing everybody for blocks around with a snack of roast pork. Manhattan's Four Seasons Restaurant, where prices are rarely mentioned because so few would believe them, dispensed soup free of charge; at "21," where the only drink on the house is water, they passed out steak sandwiches and free libations without limit.
Exhilaration is a fleeting state. After hours of darkness, New Yorkers began to wonder of their city, as Othello did of doomed Desdemona,
. . . where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume?
Ever so slowly, Con Edison found enough of it to relume sections of the city. At 5:28 a.m., precisely twelve hours after everything went black, a large section of midtown Manhattan blazed anew with light--causing those whose electric clocks were right on time to wonder the following morning whether it had all been only a dream.
It had not--as the run on shirts, socks and underwear, the appearance of thousands of haggard employees and the empty spaces at 30% of the desks and workbenches throughout the city amply proved. With few exceptions, New Yorkers the morning after could fully appreciate the sign that appeared in the window of a littered midtown Automat: PARDON OUR APPEARANCE.
WE WERE UP ALL NIGHT.
Calm in the Tank. Deep inside the Pentagon, in the National Military Command Center--called "the tank"--first reports of the power failure flashed in from Strategic Air Command headquarters at Omaha and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at Colorado Springs. Both reported that eight major military bases in the Northeastern U.S. had suddenly --and inexplicably--shifted to auxiliary power but that "the trouble was confined to a particular area and not due to bombs or such."
Communications with SAC and NORAD headquarters were checked and found intact. NORAD reported nothing alien or unfriendly in the skies over the U.S. "The Pentagon," said a senior officer, "remained calm, although pulses quickened."
On the other side of the Potomac, at Civil Defense headquarters, an official first heard about the blackout from a home-bound employee. When it did swing into action, the unwieldy agency determined that its 97 offices in eight Northeastern states and 720-point nationwide warning system were functioning properly.
One Dog. The morning after, the Eastern seaboard experienced a huge hiccup in its usually well-ordered flow of commerce, industry and communications. Both the New York and Amer ican Stock Exchanges delayed their openings 65 minutes. New York's Commodity Exchange, Inc., could not open at all, and disappointed copper-futures traders had to sit on the sidelines while Rhodesia declared independence, a development that otherwise would have sent the volatile metal soaring--and did at the next session.
Mountains of unsorted checks piled up in banks where computers that can process 200,000 checks hourly had whirred to a halt. Equally mountainous were the 50 million pieces of mail--one-fifth of the U.S. total daily volume--that piled up, causing some West Coast deliveries to lag as much as two days.
In Manhattan, Macy's and Gimbels finally agreed: business was down drastically. Some 12,000 theatergoers missed 21 Broadway shows (one off-Broadway production went on before seven adults and a dog). Overall, the loss in business and time was estimated at $100 million, with New York City alone accounting for some 4,122,000 man-hours down the drain, equal to $8,454,000.
Dunlop Tire's Buffalo plant lost 1,700 tires (worth $50,000) when power failed during the critical curing process. At the Tonawanda, N.Y., Chevrolet plant, 350 engine blocks had to be junked because high-speed drills froze while boring piston holes. Ford's huge Mahwah, N.J., auto assembly plant, eagerly awaiting power, was only number two on the list. When the Rockland & Orange Light & Power Co. got on stream again, Vice President Dean Seifreid overruled the auto plant in favor of West Point. "Those cadets," he said, "have to study tonight." The Ford plant was turned on shortly afterward. Bakers saw their profits flatten along with their loaves; 300,000 were spoiled in New York State alone.
Herculean Task. In the mortified aftermath, utility companies faced a herculean task in getting one-sixth of the nation moving again. When a steam-driven dynamo closes down, the power to restart the heavy machine--up to 30 tons--in most cases comes initially from electricity. Moreover, once a steam turbine stops, its shaft cools and shrinks; it must be brought up gradually to generating speed, or it will not have the proper relationship to its bearings and may "freeze." In a hydroelectric system, by contrast, sluice gates can simply be cranked open to let gushing water turn the great turbines by gravity. Thus Ontario Hydro-Electric, with 60 water-powered plants, managed to restore its first current to Toronto in less than an hour. Rochester Gas & Electric used three small stations where generators could be powered by the Genesee River to actuate two of its larger plants; the lights were on again by 11 p.m.
Restarting Boston Edison Co.'s South Boston steam plant was a far more tortuous process. Workers broke up the scaffolding of a powerhouse under construction and used the wood to stoke an auxiliary furnace to heat fuel oil. Once the oil was sufficiently warmed, it was ignited to build up a pressure in the steam system of 200 Ibs. per sq. in.; that pressure, in turn, enabled auxiliary electric units to heat the heavy bunker oil on which the plant's many turbines run. Only then could the first of three 35,000-kw. generators begin to turn, and power was finally restored throughout Boston by 1:15 a.m.
Bailed Out. In New York City, the U.S. Navy helped speed the recovery. From the Bayonne, N.J., Naval Supply Center came two portable generators to restart a Con Ed steam plant in Queens. The destroyer U.S.S. Bristol, which had been lying to in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, crossed the East River and delivered needed cable to another plant. Still, power in Con Ed's area was the last to be fully reestablished; the blackout in most of New York City and adjacent Westchester County lasted up to 13 hours, continued in isolated pockets all through the next day.
FPC investigating teams were dispatched to headquarters of the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., which operates in upstate New York, and to Con Edison's Manhattan headquarters. Then, two days after the blackout, Government power experts and executives of the 20 major utility companies that make up CANUSE--83 in all--gathered in the commission's Washington headquarters to find out how the thing that few thought would ever happen had come about.
No Evidence. Not one utility expert could offer an explanation as to what touched off the U.S.'s greatest blowout. Company executives unanimously reported no faulty equipment; each maintained that his operation was normal prior to the trouble. Said Paul Mehrtens, president of Western Massachusetts Electric: "Our real problem is that we don't know enough to explain it. We are doing what they do after an airline crash--getting all the pieces back into the hangar and putting them together."
Nevertheless, enough pieces were in to permit some educated guesses. By all odds, the trouble started in the Lake Ontario region, scene of the first power failure or "outage" (which some newspapers felicitously misprinted as "outrage"). Power in this area flows clockwise in a loop running from Syracuse to Niagara, Toronto, Massena, N.Y., and back to Syracuse (see map). Just before the blackout, the flow reversed; Ontario Hydro was jolted when voltage that Toronto usually relays toward Massena suddenly started coming from Massena. Seconds later the loop failed.
In all probability, the system fell victim to a phenomenon known as "cascading"--a sort of galloping high blood pressure in electricity arteries. In the Eastern U.S., alternating electric current pulsates through wires in waves of 60 cycles per second. When there is a sudden drain on the line, power rushes in to make up for the loss, but there is a tendency in such cases for the waves to pile up on each other in wild, evergrowing oscillations that carom through the circuit. If cascading gets serious enough, it triggers the "domino effect" --the automatic opening, one after the other, of safety switches that prevent damage to the system. Unless the energy pool can dampen such turbulence, the only way a member of the circuit can be protected from the cascading hypertension is to quarantine itself by cutting away from the whole system.
"Hell of a Flick." The mystery was who or what first pulled the plug that started the loop drain--it could have been anything from a generator feeding power at the wrong frequency to a switch thrown in error by a utility-company employee. What is clear is that most of CANUSE's members were not able to quarantine themselves fast enough to save their own systems. Some utilities' officials argue that total quarantine is impossible, given 1) the obligations of a member to come to the aid of its pool, and 2) the speed at which a cascade travels. Nonetheless, Maine was the only New England state completely unaffected by the blackout. It was able to cut off its single, 115-kilovolt line to CANUSE in time. The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland system escaped because its seven connections to CANUSE blew in time. Con Edison had no automatic cutoff system that protected it in the emergency.
Yet, in the view of many power experts, the problem goes far beyond breakaways, centering on the whole question of how to perfect the pool systems so that they can absorb major disturbances without being pulled down. Only two things seemed certain at week's end. It had been, as Texas' Democratic Representative Walter Rogers, chairman of the House Interior Committee's power subcommittee, wryly noted, "a hell of a flick." And it could well happen again.
Thin on Research? Thus, the blackout may have proved a timely warning. "Think what one Russian with a pair of pliers could do," mused Northern Ontario Natural Gas Co. Chairman C. Spencer Clark. To others, it was a reminder that bigger systems may invite bigger blackouts, unless they are made more reliable. The suspicion among many was that the utilities, in their increasing reliance on pools to meet the ever-rising U.S. demand for power--it has doubled in every recent decade--have cut themselves thin on research and development that might have prevented last week's debacle.
Predictably, the interconnection--or grid--system of itself came under fire. Whatever its virtues or failings, Vermont's Republican Senator George Aiken suggested, "we should construct our power system so that if one egg goes rotten, the others won't." Another clear lesson to many experts is that vast, interlocking grids need to be policed more closely. Under existing law, the Federal Power Commission is empowered only to regulate interstate wholesale electric-power rates, issue permits and licenses for hydroelectric power plants, and perform other bookkeeping chores. The power companies themselves decide what lines will be linked together and how.
Clearly, also, the grids need fail-safe mechanisms to ensure against massive, crippling interruptions of power. Texas' Representative Rogers, for one, envisions "a three-way buffer," consisting of a secondary system to take over if the primary power supply fails, and yet a third backup system in the unlikely event that the secondary supply fails.
As last week's near disaster demonstrated, it is up to man to protect himself not only against the mindless obedience of the machines he has created but also against the capricious disobedience of the energy that he has enslaved. Most Americans were shocked by the number of airports, subways, commuter trains, hospitals and highways that lack auxiliary power systems. Without such elementary precautions, another massive blackout, say in midwinter, could prove far more calamitous than "a hell of a flick." As it was, for most of those who slogged through it, memories of 1965's Biggest Blackout would probably last the rest of their lives.
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