New York adds to its history of blackouts

When the lights go out on Broadway, to quote singer Billy Joel, the whole world knows about it.

Actually, the lights went out Saturday in the middle of a Jennifer Lopez (J-Lo) concert at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.

Half of Times Square and a good chunk of the West Side of the borough lost power for a few hours, starting around 6:45 pm Saturday.

Activity in Times Square returned to normal on Sunday, and the 26 Broadway theaters that had to close were open again.

Although the blackout wasn’t up there with the scarier ones of 1965, 1977 (42 years to the day of Saturday’s outage) and 2003, it wasn’t long before word spread. This was, after all, the first city blackout in the modern social media era.

The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, was out of town campaigning in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination. He hurriedly returned on Sunday morning.

“New Yorkers are absolutely the strongest, the toughest, the most resilient of any people anywhere,” de Blasio said Sunday.

“Our first responders did an absolutely exemplary job. Pressed into service in large numbers, very quickly, making sure that folks stuck in elevators were rescued, making sure that folks on those two subway trains were brought to safety, making sure that traffic was controlled,” he said. “An amazing job by FDNY, NYPD, Emergency Management, DOT – so many agencies immediately deployed because they have been preparing for situations like this and they knew what to do and they brought a huge amount of personnel in to do it.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped in as the chief blackout spokesman on TV while de Blasio was away. Cuomo said Saturday that he could “count on my fingers” the number of trips he’s taken outside New York in his eight years as governor.

He said in a radio interview on Sunday that he would have state investigators conduct an independent review of the outage, The New York Times reported.

“You lose power, chaos is right around the corner,” he said.

US Senator Chuck Schumer called for the Department of Energy to investigate Con Ed and how it has invested in the power grid. “This type of massive blackout is entirely preventable with the right investments in our grid,” the Senate’s top Democrat said on Sunday.

Consolidated Edison Co of New York is the city’s main electric utility.

Government and utility officials were still searching for clues on Sunday for the five-hour outage that left 73,000 customers without power. No deaths or injuries resulted from the blackout, which encompassed West 30th Street to West 72nd Street, an area filled with tourist attractions and Broadway theaters.

A transformer explosion at West 49th Street was isolated as the catalyst for the loss of power to subways, homes and businesses.

De Blasio said the city and Con Ed ruled out a surge in usage as a factor. Neither a cyberattack nor a terrorist act was to blame, de Blasio added.

The outages struck just as shows were starting at theaters in Midtown and at the Lincoln Center Plaza on the Upper West Side. With subway stations suddenly dark, thousands spilled into the streets on a hot night.

“I guess this is what they call a New York moment,” Briallen Hopper, who had been stuck on a subway train for an hour, wrote on Twitter, with a video of a choir singing at sunset. She wrote of “an evacuated Carnegie Hall concert happening in the street”.

In a photo on Twitter taken after sundown, a civilian was seen directing traffic in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood with a toy light saber.

All Broadway theaters had to close except the Winter Garden Theater, Nederlander Theater and Lyceum Theatre, authorities said.

But among those who entertained theatergoers with improvised performances were the casts of the musicals Waitress, Hadestown, Come From Away and Rock Of Ages.

One Twitter user named Antony posted video of the cast of Hamilton: An American Musical singing from theater windows to crowds below.

And Bronx native Jennifer Lopez sent her regrets in a video clip in a Twitter post to fans attending her Madison Square Garden concert.

“I am obviously heartbroken and devastated. I love you. I am so sorry this happened in the middle of our moment, at our show,” she wrote. Lopez rescheduled the show for Monday.

Over the next five days, the city faces daily peak temperatures in the high-80s to low-90s Fahrenheit, the National Weather Service said.

Con Ed President Timothy Cawley assured that the utility’s electrical system will be able to handle increased demand for air conditioning.

“We are prepared to the end of the week,” he said. “We could still serve the system on the hottest day of the year.” Reuters contributed to this story.

MICHAEL OWENS / AP