Darkness at Noon

In Philadelphia, 1,500 subway riders stumbled through darkness from their stalled trains beneath the city where Benjamin Franklin started it all by attracting a bolt of lightning with kite and key. In Menlo Park, N.J., on the spot where Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb, an "eternal light" winked out for an instant before an emergency generator restored its glow.

From Hackensack to Pottstown, Lock Haven to Dover, the power lines went dead for up to nine daylight hours throughout a 15,000-sq.-mi. chunk of the East. More than 13 million people, living in three-quarters of New Jersey, much of eastern Pennsylvania, eastern Maryland and northern Delaware, were caught last week in the nation's second great power failure.

General Motors sent home 4,000 day-shift workers from its Linden, N.J., plant and canceled operations at five other facilities. Laboratories, factories and offices throughout the heavily industrialized region also shut down. Schoolchildren got an unexpected holiday; police and firemen were called in for emergency shifts. At a Wilmington medical center, a 10-lb. 2-oz. boy was born by flashlight.

Emergency Solution. Coal miners near Wilkes-Barre scurried 300 ft. to the surface when fans that dissipate dangerous fumes failed. Two window washers spent two hours and 18 minutes outside the 16th floor of the Farmers Bank Building in Wilmington, passing the time waving at office girls in the building across the street. In a darkened Philadelphia building, where a federal committee to study ways of handling emergency situations was in session, its nine members solved their own by walking down nine flights to the street.

The failure crippled nearly one-third of the 48,000-sq.-mi. area served by the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, a power grid serving those three states plus Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C. It began in southeastern Pennsylvania, when a 230,000-volt power line abruptly surged with 606,000 kilowatts. The overloaded line heated up and cross-circuited with a low-voltage line. The Philadelphia Electric Co. had twice warned system dispatchers to anticipate a heavy load and split it between two lines, but the orders, for some reason, were disregarded. The short circuit automatically shut down Philadelphia Electric's Muddy Run power station. Inexplicably, two other generating plants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey shut down, and the system fell dead.

New York, which bore the brunt of 1965's Northeast blackout, was spared when automatic relays opened to cut it off from the interconnection. That stroke--and the fact that it was a bright, clear day--saved the area from the near catastrophe that engulfed it on the night of Nov. 9, 1965, when 30 million people, over 80,000 sq. mi., spent up to twelve frantic hours in the dark.

Slim Margin. After the 1965 shock, the White House, federal officials and private power companies declared that steps would be taken to ensure that it would never happen again. In fact, there have been 17 serious power failures across the U.S. since the 1965 black out. The P.-J.-M. grid, which Federal Power Commission Chairman Lee C. White calls "one of our better-coordinated pools," is in the midst of a major expansion but offers a safety margin of only 3% over this summer's anticipated peak load, far short of the 12% that most experts consider minimal. "I guess we were a little complacent," admitted Austin T. Gardner, president of the Delmarva Power & Light Co. "We really didn't think it would happen here."

In the wake of the failure, a Senate committee met with FPC Chairman White to examine its human and mechanical causes. The biggest issue at stake is how to build in safeguards to save the nation's electric-grid system from its Achilles' heel. In theory, and in most cases of minor failure, the system works as planned. When one power plant breaks down, interconnections permit the slack to be taken up by others; conversely, when one is generating more than its needs, it can supply power to others. The weakness of the system is that a lightning-fast chain reaction can knock out all the links.

At week's end, as Lee White asked Congress for authority to set and enforce higher standards of reliability, the East could take little comfort from his prognosis: "It could be ten years before we have any similar problem. But it could happen again tomorrow."

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