THE $1BN BLACKOUT
Where were you when the lights went out in New York City?...so the song goes. Newsman MICHAEL COLE was about to tuck into dessert when everything was plunged into darkness. He tells how a party atmosphere soon gave way to a terrifying rampage of arson and
IT was just after 9.30pm on a balmy Wednesday evening, July 13, 1977. I was relaxing in Mamma Leone’s restaurant on Second Avenue and I was feeling good.
I had just returned from an arduous assignment in Central America, reporting for the BBC on Guatemala’s “Confrontation” with Britain over its claim to sovereignty over neighbouring Belize.
My dinner companion – field producer John Exelby – and I had just ordered dessert when the lights went out. Exelby says I upbraided the waiter because I was still waiting for my Zabaglione.
After 20 minutes still in the dark, I got up from the table and announced to Exelby: “This is a story. The self-styled ‘Greatest City in the World’ is being crippled by a power cut. How can this be? What’s going on? Let’s get out there and find out”.
Less than 30 minutes into the outage we were filming in Herald Square, opposite Macy’s, “The World’s Biggest Department Store”. Macy’s was “dark”, of course, like every other building along Broadway, “The Greatwhiteway” of showbiz legend.
People were milling around the statue of
George M Cohan, composer of “Give My Regards to Broadway”. Regards and best wishes would never be as urgently needed as they would be that night, a horror show of violence, arson and looting, with a record number of arrests not exceeded since.
But at first there was a strange sense of celebration in the air, as if somebody had thrown a gigantic surprise party. Young people were dancing and singing in the darkened streets, as if in celebration that the modern world had suddenly stopped.
Many were wearing cheap necklaces made from bendable glass fibre tubes filled with gas in luminous pastel colours – lurid pink, orange, yellow and ghostly green.
The only other illumination came from the headlights of the cars and taxis.
As if suddenly afflicted by moth-syndrome, the young and daring started jumping in front of the traffic, as if to bathe in the scarce and precious beams of light by making the vehicles stop.
I don’t see a single policeman or any other presence that might have indicated law and order. On a warm evening in mid-summer, nobody had thought to put the National Guard on standby.
I told BBC viewers the famed “Great Whiteway” of Broadway had been plunged into darkness by the greatest power failure in American history. That claim was a bit of a guess but proved to be precisely right.
The electricity supply had failed all the way back to the Great Lakes, with each blackout cascading on to the next section of
the power distribution grid. New York’s main power company, Consolidated Edison, has been knocked out by a succession of catastrophes, natural and man-made.
First a lightning strike hit a sub-station on the Hudson River. Then a second lightning strike overloaded other power lines.
When it became clear the lights were not coming on any time soon, the trouble began.
We filmed youths running out of the broken windows of a bicycle shop carrying stolen bikes. In Brooklyn, the looters were more ambitious. Fifty brand new Pontiac cars were driven out of a dealership.
Nearby, two whole blocks were on fire, one of 25 major arson attacks.
Thirty-one neighbourhoods were hit. Electrical shops were picked clean and there was hardly a window remaining intact.all told, 1,616 shops were looted.
The criminal damage was estimated at $300million, the equivalent of $1.3billion today.the police reacted promptly once the scale of the crisis became clear, arresting 4,500 looters. The looting continued until dawn and the police toll was 550 injured.
Four thousand people had to be rescued
from stalled subway trains and the road tunnels out of Manhattan were closed because all ventilation had closed down.
What had started as a party, a sort of mid-summer Halloween, had ended as a night of anarchy, fear and criminal damage, tearing at the sinews of a great city.
Civilisation, I noted, and not for the first time, is tissue thin.i was glad to have Bob Grevemberg with me when we were filming. A former Det Sgt in the Vice Squad of the New Orleans Police Department, Bob took no nonsense from anyone.
Many people were stuck in lifts that night. But far more were marooned high up in apartments throughout the next day.
If there was one thing worthy of admiration that night it was the way The New York Times, Daily News and the New York Post switched publication to printing presses outside the area. The city’s papers were on the streets more or less on schedule.
It was easier for the TV networks to switch to their studios inwashington DC.
They, too, did a good job that night and the next morning, covering the greatest catastrophe to envelop New York until the city was struck by the terrible events of September 11, 2001.
This all happened at a time of financial crisis for New York. It was also the summer of “Son of Sam”, the serial murderer whose crimes held the city in fear.
This was the era before New York got a grip on crime and its chaotic finances.
For some reason Mayor Abe Beame thought it would be a good idea to hold a news conference to tell voters how well the city had coped with the emergency.
He glossed over the inconvenient fact that it took much longer than 24 hours to get things back to anything like normal.
After 30 minutes of listening to excuses dressed up as vindication and even selfpraise, I felt compelled to speak: “Mr Mayor”, I said, “Doesn’t all this terrible looting, criminal damage and unlawful behaviour really indicate that ‘The Big Apple’ is utterly rotten to the core?”
He went ballistic: “Who said that? Who’s that British voice.the BBC eh?
“Well, let me tell YOU SIR, that New York is the greatest city in the world and what happened doesn’t change a thing….”
I am glad to report that one or two things happened that night that underscored the calm resilience of a great city. When the lights went out at Shea Stadium, the Mets were at the bottom of the sixth innings against the Chicago Cubs, losing 2-1. The game was suspended and the crowd dispersed in disciplined, even exemplary order. When the game was resumed in September, the Cubs won 5-2.
And at Yankee Stadium a week after the blackout, an All Star Game was staged as if to say “New York is back”.
I went and even walked on the field, getting the autograph of baseball legend Joe Dimaggio, once married to Marilyn Monroe, on my souvenir programme.
I had seen a vivid, very scary and utterly compelling preview of what the end of the world is likely to look like.
And the coda of the story is that the BBC, seeking to promote its global news service, recently broadcast a self-praising television commercial.
This featured BBC coverage of several historic events, including my “stand-upper” in Herald Square.
And the stand-upper stood up quite well, for something that wasn’t even written on my shirt cuff, but rather delivered ad-lib and ex-tempore, using Bob’s one battery light, one of the few sources of illumination available in New York at that moment.
On my next trip to New York, I returned to Mamma Leone’s to complete my dinner. The Zabaglione was delicious.