Misery in New York

The torments were almost biblical, the protagonists stoic, the resolution anticlimactic.

The first torment was New York City's power shortage, a constant worry since the great blackout of 1965. Predicted by the New York Public Service Commission last December, the new crisis became a fact in June. Within 24 days, Consolidated Edison not only announced that its big nuclear power plant at Indian Point would remain inoperative all summer, but also that its biggest single generator--"Big Allis," a million-kilowatt unit in Queens--had broken down and could not be repaired until December. These losses cut the utility's generating capacity by 17%. To provide new power, Con Ed quickly made arrangements to buy surplus energy from sources as far away as the Tennessee Valley and Canada. Then New York grimly settled back to wait for the summer's first long hot spell.

It came with a vengeance. Not only was the weather sweltering--temperatures hovered around 90 degrees all week long--but there was also a temperature inversion. Like a lid on a jar, a stagnant upper layer of warm air kept heated air below from escaping. And what air! The city's brisk winds stopped dead; the sky darkened. Oxidants, caused by the reaction of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons to sunlight, became a major addition to the city's usual outpourings of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and tiny particles of lead, asbestos and other suspended matter. Day after day the city's Department of Air Resources reported pollution levels ranging between "unhealthy" and "unsatisfactory." SO2 levels hit .23 parts per million parts of air at some points around the city, compared with the federal emissions standard of .1 ppm. Result: many New Yorkers complained of smarting eyes and sore throats. "New York is like a pickle in its own brine," wheezed a bedraggled typist. A secretary put it another way: "When I came to work, I felt like I should take out my whole respiratory system and wash it." But strangely enough, neither hospitals nor doctors reported unusual numbers of patients. The favorite prescription: "Get out of town."

Inside the Cloud. Everyone hoped for cleansing rains. Instead, the city was afflicted with brief, tantalizing cloudbursts that dripped soot out of the sky onto people's clothes. One downpour temporarily knocked out power lines in three boroughs and Westchester County, leaving nearly 10,000 families without electricity--and air conditioning. But most of the time, a dull, maddening haze obscured the sky. "It looked awful," said Pilot-Photographer Tony Linck, after he had helicoptered around Manhattan in midweek, on assignment for TIME. "It was like flying inside a yellow-gray cloud. We had to fly by compass at one point."

In Con Ed's control room on Manhattan's West Side, which looks like a set lifted from Dr. Strangelove, the company's technicians coolly watched banks of panels covered with fluttering dials, oscillating graphs and blinking lights. Given a capacity supply of about 7,300 megawatts, on one day they doled out as much as 7,245 Mw in the peak-consumption hours. But each time, as the safety margin neared, the calm technicians ordered voltages reduced by 3% to 5% and quickly asked the city's biggest consumers to start unplugging everything from air conditioners and lights to escalators.

Black Sales. Cooperating with Con Ed were many stores, office buildings and apartment houses throughout the city. The 75,000-watt sign on the Allied Chemical tower in Times Square was darkened, though almost every other light in the Great White Way blazed as usual. On Madison Avenue, several boutiques decided that air conditioning was more important than lights and conducted black sales: customers tried on clothes in the dark.

To conserve electricity one afternoon, the subway system sidelined one-third of its trains and ran the rest at a top speed of 18 m.p.h., less than half the normal maximum. Perspiring passengers tolerated the experience, muttering remarks like, "So at this speed, why the hell doesn't Con Ed cut its rates in half?" But slowing the rapid transit system also destroyed its appeal. As a result, private cars flocked onto the streets, their exhausts adding to pollution problems.

At week's end the immediate crisis seemed to have passed. President Nixon, commenting on the inversion, found a silver lining to the yellow-gray smog: "In some ways, it was perhaps fortunate that the East Coast saw the problem in such a massive manner," he said. "Now we realize that we don't have much time left." Best of all, most New Yorkers did not blame nature for what was clearly a man-made mess. "If you live in your own smog," said a short-order cook, "you got to know it's yours, even if it kills you."

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