Brilliant

by Jane Brox

  The fine, clear voices that ordinarily gave the news of world—the dead in Vietnam, the protesters at home, the condition of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower's heart—turned tinny and staticky, reduced to the sound on transistor radios. The first reports that came through were wildly inaccurate, claiming that the blackout stretched all the way to Miami, that it reached to Chicago, that Canada lay in darkness. The fears would not be allayed for several hours. "We still knew nothing about what had really happened, what had created our predicament," recalled a New Yorker writer, "but just then anybody who might still have been worried that the blackout heralded a foreign takeover was reassured by an announcement from the Pentagon, over the little transistors, that it had no effect on our 'defense posture.'...The power companies soon provided similar comfort, with their talk of 'outage.'" Still, rumors would live long after the lights returned.

  The true quiet of the world felt strange, "as if the darkness had somehow smudged away the horns and the other noises of the traffic." Electrical sounds, like Pythagoras's music of the spheres, had always been in people's ears and were what they took for silence. In the relative hush, suddenly a million little things were in danger of perishing. Damp glass greenhouses began to cool down. At the Bronx and Central Park zoos, "the men, working without sleep, stuffed blankets between the bars in the small-mammals house, where diminutive, heat-sensitive lemurs, flying squirrels, and small monkeys began their nocturnal peregrinations. The reptile house presented a difficult problem, since no one was willing to try to wrap a cobra in a blanket. Small portable propane gas heaters were taken in to warm the cold-blooded vipers, anacondas, iguanas, caymans, crocodiles and their ilk." It may have been too cold for iguanas, but the temperature outside was perfect for storing blood—between 38 and 41 degrees—so hospitals and blood banks took their supplies to the roofs for keeping.

  Night was truly night again, just as in the Middle Ages, and, also as in the Middle Ages, light became precious once more. People struck match after match to light their way down flights of stairs: "Two matches, carefully tended, were enough to light the distance between one floor and the next. Walking down eighteen flights to the lobby, we used exactly thirty-six matches." People shared candles with one another, and gougers sold them on the streets. Tapers stuck in beer and wine bottles or tea lights set on saucers illuminated cold meals in homes, restaurants, and coffee shops, as well as a banquet in the Astor Ballroom. They flickered alongside pool games and across the faces of actors preparing for a performance—the lights, after all, could come back on at any time. They burned in newsrooms and at newsstands, in firehouses and police stations, on the mayor's desk and beside card games on trains. Wax dripped onto tabletops and onto floors; days later newspapers would publish instructions on how to remove it from surfaces.

  Just as the lights went out, the moon, a day after full, was rising:

  The moonlight lay on the streets like thick snow, and we had a curious, persistent feeling that we were leaving footprints in it. Something was odd about buildings and corners in this beautiful light. The city presented a tilted aspect, and even our fellow-pedestrians, chattering with implacable cheerfulness, appeared foreshortened as they passed; they made us think of people running downhill. It was a block more before we understood: The shadows, for once, all fell in the same direction—away from the easterly, all-illuminating moon.... We were in a night forest, and, for a change, home lay not merely uptown but north.

  Without that moon, the night of November 9, 1965, would have been very different. Air tragedy, it was said, had been averted because its light, along with that made possible by auxiliary power in the main control towers at the airports, was enough for pilots already in descent to see by. The previous night, rainstorms had soaked the region, and clouds had covered the moon and stars. Had the lights gone out then, there surely would have been more than one disaster. As it was, emergency rooms filled with people who'd been hit by cars or tripped on the sidewalks. There were pockets of looting, but by dawn there would be less crime reported than on an ordinary November night.

  Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves—simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops—the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches—without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty, and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things. Skyscrapers take on a geological sheen, and the stars resemble those of ancient times.

  Yet unlike in ancient times, people weren't accustomed to giving in to the long November night. For most, the dark wasn't restful; it simply felt as if the world had stopped and everyone and everything were suspended in amber, especially after the novelty of the first hour wore off. For as long as no one had any idea at all how long the helplessness would go on, there was no future, and no knowing the future. After a few hours, theaters canceled their scheduled performances, and people ran out of pocket money. They were still lined up outside phone booths waiting to call home, but what could they say other than that they were somewhere? November 9–10, 1965, became known as "the night of the long night," and it was particularly long for those trying to sleep in hotel lobbies or on office floors; in barber chairs or on cots in banquet rooms; curled up in hallways or sprawled on subway stairs or benches in train stations.

  Meanwhile, throughout the affected area, each local utility had become an island again, and in each affected power station not only were the managers looking at systems that had no obvious failure, but they were also still unsure as to whether their own station was at fault or merely one link in the cascade. They had to get their system back up with the same equipment that had shut it down, and although it took only a few seconds to lose power, it would take hours to get back on-line—for it's no simple thing to align the spheres again. All switches, relays, and circuit breakers had to be checked, as did turbines, generators, and boilers. "The turbine generators had to be turned slowly by mechanical means to make sure they had not been bowed out of shape in the blackout." The power failure itself had caused some damage. For instance, turbine bearings at Con Edison's Ravenswood plant were damaged by lack of lubrication during the lapse in power.

  Power was needed to beget power. "Unfortunately many of the affected utilities had made no provision for the unlikely possibility that their entire system would shut down simultaneously and, hence, there were no independent auxiliary power sources for such an eventuality. Intricate circuits had to be established, some from remote sources, to feed in the essential auxiliary power." Even with power, the enormous boilers, some of which were as tall as fifteen-story buildings, had to be heated up to 3,000 degrees, and the pressure had to be built up to more than 2,000 pounds per square inch. And everything couldn't be turned on at once, or it would overload the system. "As power became available, it was essential that the load be picked up in a careful, sectionalized, synchronized process. As each section was brought up to load, it was necessary to synchronize its frequency with that of the energized remainder of the system. It was then possible to tie the section in with the remainder of the network without disturbing the maintenance of the network's synchronism."

  Service was restored to parts of New York and New England within a few hours, but it would be almost midnight before northern New York State was completely back online; Boston and Long Island didn't get power until 1:00 A.M. In New York City, it would take more than thirteen hours for the power to fully return.

  The electric lights of New York—the gaudy marquees and overlit skyscrapers, which had for decades far exceeded necessity—accounted for a small fraction of the overall power demand. Even so, it was by light that most people had come to gauge their connection to
life, and it was the loss of light that was most remarked upon. The following day, the headline of an Italian newspaper read: "New York Cancelled by Darkness."

  Sometime after three in the morning, as in section after section of the city signs of a world coming to life again registered in little whirrings and tickings, faint and then full, the editor of Life magazine noted: "Ralph Morse, who had taken the first pictures of the blinded city from a 2 8th-floor window, now began to take the last pictures from the same position. Slowly, during the next 1½ hours, the city came alive again, a blaze of lights here, a blaze there.... Morse's camera caught the radiant rebirth."

  ***

  That morning, subway workers had to comb all 720 miles of track before the trains could run again, just to make sure no one had fallen and lay injured on the rails or was lost and wandering along the lines. Gas crews went from house to house to check the pilot lights—which were powered by electricity—in the stoves and boilers of every customer. The current of weary people who'd spent the night in the train stations flowed past people coming to work again.

  Perhaps it had been hardest on the old and the sick, who'd had a nerve-wracking time. For a few, the dark was fatal: one man was found at the bottom of an elevator shaft, still clutching the nub of a doused candle. For others, it was a night unlike any other in its generous and quiet beauty. Among those who spent hours playing cards and drinking whiskey or making small talk in dark offices and subway cars with people they sometimes couldn't even see, some struck up a camaraderie they would never have had by any other light. "Everybody recognizes everybody else now," one woman said. "Although they've seen me for ten years and they've done nothing but help me up the stairs, now it's a tip of the hat and a 'good morning, Phyllis, how are you today?'"

  The lost hours eventually faded into a strange dream full of quirky things, though there were moments that would be intensely remembered afterward—of lighting grease pencils to see by, of being given coffee and pastries by transit workers while waiting in a darkened subway car, of the sheen of the moonlight on the side of a skyscraper.

  The blackout of 1965 spurred the first serious examination of the electric grid and its fragility. The subsequent Federal Power Commission report, besides advocating extensive changes to the grid system itself—ones that were hoped would both strengthen the grid and confine future outages—recommended backup energy supplies for airports, hospitals, elevators, gas stations, and radio and television stations; auxiliary lighting for stairways, exits, subway stations, and tunnels; subway evacuation and traffic control plans. But even with such measures in place, in July 1977, when a series of lightning strikes sent an enormous surge through New York City's power system, circuit breakers—which were designed to reset automatically—failed to close, and the city was plunged into darkness again.

  Although in many ways this outage was similar to the one twelve years before—the stalled subways and traffic, the gouging, the camaraderie among people stuck together, the kindnesses (restaurants set up tables on the sidewalk and stayed open; a bagpiper played in Grand Central Station)—the city was a different place, the age a different age. Unemployment among young men in some of the black and Hispanic neighborhoods exceeded 40 percent. The night was hot and muggy—sweltering—and the pale sliver of a new moon set before the lights went out at 9:34 P.M., so there was no consoling light reflecting off the skyscrapers, nothing but the torch on the Statue of Liberty to relieve the blackness. Looting broke out in all boroughs of the city, and arsonists set more than a thousand blazes. After a few hours, thieves even began stealing from the looters in a free-for-all that continued beyond the twenty-five hours it took to restore power. Police arrested thousands, and hospitals were swamped with people cut by knives and glass. Three people died in the fires, and a looter was shot dead. In a number of hospitals, the emergency backup systems, which had been made mandatory after the 1965 blackout, failed to work. Doctors stitched wounds by flashlight, and nurses resorted to squeezing air bags by hand for patients who were dependent on respirators.

  In writing of it later, no one waxed poetic about the moon on the buildings. It was the looting that dominated people's thoughts. "We are in much worse trouble than we thought," commented a writer for The New Yorker. "In the blindness of that night, New York and America could see rage. We've been put on notice again. We may continue to ignore the terrible problems of poverty and race, but we must do so aware of the risks to both justice and peace."

  The size of the machine that had become us had grown to be almost incalculable—some would say it was the largest machine in the world. Yet when it failed, societies were pervaded by the same feeling that those who had experienced the loss of gaslight in the nineteenth century had: of being vulnerable, of having given over control of our life. Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times after the 1965 blackout, imagined the ultimate fragility of the electric grid:

  The end came on Sept. 17, 1973. It had been forecast by an M.I.T. undergraduate who had been running the law of probability through his computer.... The chain of events on that last day began at Shea Stadium at 4:43 P.M. when the Mets finished a scoreless ninth inning against the Mexico City Braves, thus becoming the first team in history to lose 155 games in a single baseball season.... Two minutes later, Irma Amstadt, a Bronx housewife, turned on the kitchen faucet and noticed that there was no water. Going to the telephone, she dialed her plumber, not knowing that at that very moment, in defiance of probability, 6,732,548 other persons in New York were simultaneously dialing telephone numbers.... Mrs. Amstadt's call was the one that broke the system's back.

  The grid can be as fragile as Baker imagined it to be. In August 2003, during hot weather and high demand, transmission lines—as transmission lines will do when they heat up—expanded and sagged all over the grid. In Walton Hills, Ohio, sagging wires touched some overgrown trees beneath them, which began a chain of events that plunged 50 million people in the eastern United States into the dark. It was the largest blackout in American history.

  18. Imagining the Next Grid

  BY 1965, THE SAME YEAR as the Northeast blackout, New York artist Dan Flavin had turned to fluorescent light as the sole medium for his work. "Regard the light and you are fascinated—inhibited from grasping its limits at each end," he wrote in December of that year.

  While the tube itself has an actual length of eight feet, its shadow, cast by the supporting pan, has none but an illusion dissolving at its ends. This waning shadow cannot really be measured without resisting its visual effect and breaking the poetry.... Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition. For example, if you press an eight foot fluorescent lamp into the vertical climb of a corner, you can destroy that corner by glare and double shadow. A piece of wall can be visually disintegrated from the whole into a separate triangle by plunging a diagonal of light from edge to edge on the wall.

  For the next thirty years, Flavin used standard fluorescents in the available colors of blue, green, pink, red, yellow, and four kinds of white to explore everything about light save for its utility: the interplay of light and space, light and solids; the way colors mingled; the way glare and shadows dispersed solidity. He understood light as an endless and intricate medium for his work, yet he also knew that without the stability of infinite electrical connections, his works—like our own ordinary lights—were no more than heavy, inanimate objects made of glass and metal. "Permanence just defies everything," he once said. "There's no such thing.... I would rather see [my work] all disappear into the wind. Take it all away.... It's electric current with a switch—dubious.... And rust and broken glass."

  Throughout the decades of Dan Flavin's career, the connections essential to his work became more and more dubious, and not only because of power outages. By 1973 the economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan relied on abundant, cheap oil. It fueled an insatiable ca
r culture, yes, but oil was also essential to the energy grids of industrialized countries. For instance, it accounted for 20 percent of the fuel used for electricity generation in the United States. "Oil had become the lifeblood of the world's industrial economies," Daniel Yergin observed, "and it was being pumped and circulated with very little to spare. Never before in the entire postwar period had the supply-demand equation been so tight." Not only was there little to spare, but a good share of the oil consumed by the West and Japan was imported from the Middle East, and when Saudi Arabia instigated an oil embargo in the fall of 1973 in response to American arms shipments to Israel, fuel supplies tightened throughout the world. By December the price of oil, which sold on the world market for under $6 a barrel in early October, had nearly tripled in price.

  Suddenly, as the country headed into winter, the "liberty poles" so valued by American farmers, and which seemed so strong and enduring in the landscape, proved to be entirely vulnerable. To conserve existing fuel supplies, President Richard Nixon, in addition to calling for restrictions on heating fuel and gasoline and setting lower speed limits on the interstates, called for the conservation of electricity. Specifically, Nixon called for the dimming of nonessential lighting such as advertisements and all decorative Christmas lights, both public and private, including the lights in New York City's Times Square. Although the electricity required for decorative lighting accounted for only 2 to 3 percent of all energy consumption in New York City, and lighting in general was responsible for about 6 percent of energy use nationwide, officials hoped that the dimming of such lights would encourage citizens to conserve energy in their own homes. "It's very sad to be a party to darkening a city so renowned for its lights—it's just heartbreaking," the municipal service administrator for New York City commented. "But it has a psychological effect, because it's difficult to get someone to turn down his thermostat if he sees lights blazing in a public place."