The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  Power Surge Blacks Out Northeast Once Again

  By JAMES BARRON | August 15, 2003

  A SURGE OF ELECTRICITY TO WESTERN NEW York and Canada touched off a series of power failures and enforced blackouts that left parts of at least eight states in the Northeast and the Midwest without electricity. The problems forced the evacuation of office buildings, stranded thousands of commuters and flooded some hospitals with patients suffering in the stifling heat.

  In an instant that one utility official called a “blink-of-the-eye” moment shortly after 4 p.m., the grid that distributes electricity to the eastern United States became overloaded. As circuit breakers tripped at generating stations from New York to Michigan and into Canada, millions of people were instantly caught up in the largest blackout in American history.

  The power in New York City was shut off by officials struggling to head off a wider blackout. Cleveland and Detroit went dark, as did Toronto and sections of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

  Officials worked into the night to put the grid back in operation and restore electric service. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that that the power was back on in parts of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens by 11 p.m.—but not in Manhattan.

  The blackout began just after the stock exchanges had closed for the day, a slow summer day of relatively light trading. Office workers who were still at their desks watched their computer monitors blink off without warning. Soon hospitals and government buildings were switching on backup generators to keep essential equipment operating, and the police were evacuating people trapped in elevators.

  Thousands of subway passengers in New York City had to be evacuated from tunnels, and in a city still jittery from the Sept. 11 terror attacks, some people worried as they tried to find their way home. “All I could think was here we go again—it’s just like Sept. 11,” said Catherine Donnelly, who works at the New York Stock Exchange.

  So there was no air conditioning, no television, no computers. There was Times Square without its neon glow and Broadway marquees without their incandescence—all the shows were canceled. And there was a skyline that had never looked quite the way it did last night: the long, long taut strings of the bridges were dark, the red eyes that usually blink at the very top not red, not blinking.

  There was at least one pocket of trouble: On the Lower East Side, an upscale sneaker store was broken into and one of the owners beaten between 11 p.m. and midnight.

  A Powerless New York Endures

  By DAVID BARSTOW | August 15, 2003

  A TIMES SQUARE WITH NO WORKING TRAFFIC lights is not a pretty sight.

  But there stood Debra Ramsur, a traffic officer with spotless white gloves and a gleaming silver whistle, who for a time yesterday afternoon single-handedly tamed the great tides of cars and people. “Back it up!” she barked to a taxicab. “Let’s go!” she bellowed to a laggard pedestrian. And then, a bit more sweetly, “Watch out, folks.”

  On a day of colossal disruption, New York City was filled with similar scenes of stubborn resilience—and also with moments of overheated frustration, spontaneous generosity, instant profiteering, anger and humor.

  It was also, as many residents were quick to note, a day with faint and unsettling echoes of the way the city felt and looked and acted on Sept. 11. Buses were packed, with commuters pressed right up to the front windshields. Mini-communities instantly formed near every car radio and boom box. People walked along dialing again and again on cellphones that did not work, trying to reach their families.

  But if there was palpable relief as word spread that this was not the work of terrorists, there were also real though isolated moments of terror, and even tragedy.

  One middle-aged woman walked down many flights of stairs inside the darkened Met Life Building. Then she collapsed. A team of paramedics tried to resuscitate her. She stopped breathing. The paramedics tried desperately to call for an ambulance. There were none to be found quickly on this afternoon of sudden chaos.

  And so she lay there for more than half an hour, her body growing cold, in a dimly lit corner of Café Centro. The paramedics never gave up. Yet by the time an ambulance could be flagged down, it was too late. The woman was pronounced dead at St. Clare’s Hospital in Manhattan.

  More Lights Go On in Queens, One Unhappy Block at a Time

  By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN | July 24, 2006

  Con Ed employees pulling cable in Astoria during the 2006 blackout, which affected 174,000 people and caused business losses of tens of millions of dollars.

  CONSOLIDATED EDISON REPORTED MAJOR progress in the week-old struggle to restore power to western Queens, but thousands faced a new workweek without electricity and frustrations boiled over as some officials called for a declaration of emergency and the resignation of the utility’s chief executive.

  Kevin Burke, Con Ed’s chairman and chief executive, said at a briefing that utility crews had restored power to nearly 16,000 of the approximately 25,000 customers affected by the blackout. In human terms, that meant that the lights, elevators, refrigerators and air-conditioners were back on for an estimated 64,000 of the 100,000 people who had suffered through the ordeal.

  Mr. Burke insisted that he could still provide no estimate of when full power might be restored to eight square miles of Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside, Sunnyside, Hunters Point and other sections. Underground cables had burned out in those areas, apparently overloaded by the utility’s decision to keep the power flowing to most of the 400,000 residents of western Queens despite the loss of 10 major feeder cables that power the area.

  That decision meant that all of the area’s power was running through only 12 feeder cables, and through transformers and secondary cables that were not designed to take such a heavy load.

  Mr. Burke said he had no explanation for why the 10 major cables went down while Con Edison’s 56 other feeder cable networks continued to work. The root cause of the blackout, one of the city’s most prolonged in decades, is under investigation by the utility itself and by the Queens district attorney’s office, the City Council and the state’s Public Service Commission.

  TERRORISM

  Blast Hits Trade Center; Car Bomb Is Suspected

  By ROBERT D. MCFADDEN | February 27, 1993

  Six people were killed as a result of the 1993 WTC bombing and 1,042 people were injured.

  AN EXPLOSION APPARENTLY CAUSED BY A car bomb in an underground garage shook the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan with the force of a small earthquake, collapsing walls and floors, igniting fires and plunging the city’s largest building complex into a maelstrom of smoke, darkness and fearful chaos.

  The police said the blast killed at least five people and left more than 650 others injured, mostly with smoke inhalation or minor burns, but dozens with cuts, bruises, broken bones or serious burns. The police said 476 were treated at hospitals and the rest by rescue and medical crews at the scene.

  The explosion, which was felt throughout the Wall Street area and a mile away on Ellis and Liberty Islands in New York Harbor, also trapped hundreds of people in debris or in smoke-filled stairwells and elevators of the towers overhead and forced the evacuation of more than 50,000 workers from a trade center bereft of power for lights and elevators for seven hours.

  The blast also knocked out the police command and operations centers for the towers, which officials said rendered the office complex’s evacuation plans useless. There had been no warning of an impending explosion, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

  The effects of the blast radiated outward, and on a day of high drama, tragedy and heroism, there were a thousand stories: rescuers digging frantically for victims in the collapsed PATH station under the towers, soot-streaked evacuees groping for hours in the city’s tallest buildings, a woman in a wheelchair carried down 66 stories by two friends, a pregnant woman airlifted by helicopter from a tower roof, and the tales of many others stumbling out, gasping for air, terrified but glad to be alive. />
  And among the most poignant was that of a class of kindergartners from Public School 95 in Gravesend, Brooklyn. Caught on the 107th floor observatory, they took all day to walk down, singing to keep up their spirits.

  The blast, which erupted at 12:18 p.m. on the second level of a four-story underground parking garage beneath the trade center’s 110-story twin towers and the complex’s Vista Hotel, sent cars hurtling like toys, blew out a 100-foot wall and sent the floor collapsing down several stories, creating a crater 60 feet wide that reached deep into the parking complex.

  It also collapsed the ceiling of a mezzanine in the adjacent Port Authority Trans-Hudson train station, leaving dozens trapped under rubble on a concourse one floor above the platforms where hundreds awaited trains. Witnesses and rescue workers told of a blast of incredible force—of bodies hurtling through the air, of cars wrapped around pillars, of people burning and scores trapped.

  “We crawled under pipes when we arrived and everything was on fire,” said Edward Bergen, a 38-year-old firefighter who was one of the first to reach the scene of the blast. “Suddenly, a guy came walking out of the flames, like one of those zombies in the movie, ‘The Night of the Living Dead.’ His flesh was hanging off. He was a middle-aged man.”

  Nearby, Vito de Leo, 32, an air-conditioning mechanic, was eating lunch at his desk with other basement trade center workers. Suddenly, the desk rose up, came down and landed on top of him; its well protected him from a rain of falling debris. “There was total blackness,” he said. “I thought I was dead.”

  Horse Truck Explodes On Wall Street

  September 17, 1920

  AN EXPLOSION, BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN caused by a time bomb, killed 30 people and injured probably 300 others at Broad Street and Wall Streets yesterday at noon.

  The blast shattered windows for blocks around, threw the financial district into a panic and strewed the street in its immediate vicinity with the bodies of its dead and injured victims. Investigating authorities are almost certain that the disaster was due to an infernal machine left on an uncovered one-horse truck in Wall Street directly in front of the new United States Assay Office next door to the Sub-Treasury, and directly across the street from the J.P. Morgan building.

  While no arrest has been made up to last midnight, Federal, State, and city authorities were agreed that the devastating blast signaled long-threatened Red outrages.

  Throughout the nation the same interpretation was placed upon the explosion, and public buildings and great storehouses of wealth as well as conspicuous men in several cities, were placed under vigilant guard.

  A guard of thirty detectives was placed around the Morgan home in Madison Avenue last night. Pedestrians were not allowed to pass in front of the house. It was said the guard would be kept on duty all night.

  Police investigators are convinced that they face a piece of organized deviltry, executed with a terrible effectiveness that dwarfed such anarchist and other radical crimes of the past as the attempts on the lives of Russell Sage and Henry C. Frick, and the bombs in Union Square, and St. Peter’s Cathedral.

  If their interpretation is correct, the conspirators in large measure failed of whatever direct objects they had beyond sheer terrorization. They evidently timed their infernal machine for an hour when the streets of the financial district were crowded, but chose as well the hour when not the captains of the industry but their clerks and messengers were on the street. J.P. Morgan himself, who already had escaped one attempt of assassination, was in Europe.

  U.S. Attacked; Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers and Hit Pentagon

  By SERGE SCHMEMANN | September 12, 2001

  HIJACKERS RAMMED JETLINERS INTO EACH of New York’s World Trade Center towers yesterday, toppling both in a hellish storm of ash, glass, smoke and leaping victims, while a third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia. There was no official count, but President Bush said thousands had perished, and in the immediate aftermath the calamity was already being ranked the worst and most audacious terror attack in American history.

  The attacks seemed carefully coordinated. The hijacked planes were all en route to California, and therefore gorged with fuel, and their departures were spaced within an hour and 40 minutes. The first, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston for Los Angeles, crashed into the north tower at 8:48 a.m. Eighteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175, also headed from Boston to Los Angeles, plowed into the south tower.

  Then an American Airlines Boeing 757, Flight 77, left Washington’s Dulles International Airport bound for Los Angeles, but instead hit the western part of the Pentagon, the military headquarters where 24,000 people work, at 9:40 a.m. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757 flying from Newark to San Francisco, crashed near Pittsburgh, raising the possibility that its hijackers had failed in whatever their mission was.

  In all, 266 people perished in the four planes. Numerous firefighters, police officers and other rescue workers who responded to the initial disaster in Lower Manhattan were killed or injured when the buildings collapsed.

  Within an hour, the United States was on a war footing. National Guard units were called out in Washington and New York, and two aircraft carriers were dispatched to New York harbor.

  President Bush, who had been in Florida, remained aloft in Air Force One for hours, following a secretive route and making only brief stopovers at Air Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska before finally setting down in Washington at 7 p.m. The White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol were evacuated, except for the Situation Room in the White House where Vice President Cheney remained in charge.

  Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks. But the scale and sophistication of the operation, the extraordinary planning required for concerted hijackings by terrorists who had to be familiar with modern jetliners, and the history of major attacks on American targets in recent years led many officials and experts to point to Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant believed to operate out of Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s hard-line Taliban rulers rejected such suggestions, but officials took that as a defensive measure.

  Back in Washington, President Bush vowed that the United States would hunt down and punish those responsible for the “evil, despicable acts of terror.” He said the United States would make no distinction between those who carried out the hijackings and those who harbored and supported them.

  A Day When Terror Hit Close to Home

  By N. R. KLEINFIELD | September 12, 2001

  THE HORROR ARRIVED IN EPISODIC BURSTS OF chilling disbelief, signified first by trembling floors, sharp eruptions, cracked windows. There was the actual unfathomable realization of a gaping, flaming hole in first one of the tall towers, and then the same thing all over again in its twin. There was the merciless sight of bodies helplessly tumbling out, some of them in flames.

  Finally, the mighty towers themselves were reduced to nothing. Dense plumes of smoke raced through the downtown avenues, coursing between the buildings, shaped like tornadoes on their sides.

  Then every sound was cause for alarm. A plane appeared overhead. Was another one coming? No, it was a fighter jet. But was it friend or enemy? People scrambled for their lives, but they didn’t know where to go. Stay outside, go indoors? People hid beneath cars, beneath each other. “I don’t know what the gates of hell look like, but it’s got to be like this,” said John Maloney, a security director for an Internet firm in the trade center.

  “I don’t know what the gates of hell look like, but it’s got to be like this.’’

  It was the people outside, on the sidewalk, who saw and heard the beginning—the too-low roar of a jet engine. “He didn’t try to maneuver,” said Robert Pachino, a witness. “This plane was on a mission.”

  James Wang, 21, a photography student snapping pictures of people doing tai chi at a nearby park, looked up and saw people high in the north tower. They seemed like tiny figurines, and he didn’t know if they were awaiting rescue or merely
looking out. “They were standing up there,” he said. “And they jumped. One woman, her dress was billowing out.”

  When They Were Young and the Towers Were New

  By JIM RASENBERGER | September 23, 2001

  THEY WERE YOUNG MEN THEN, AND THE job was the sort that ironworkers crave when they are young. It was enormous, it was monumental, and nobody had ever put up anything like it. So the ironworkers who built the World Trade Center had a special bond to the towers that fell on Sept. 11. They erected the 192,000 tons of structural steel that went into the buildings’ frames column by column, piece by piece. It was work they could admire and feel proud of for the rest of their lives. Or so they thought.

  “I feel deprived,” said Jack Doyle, 58. “Every building down there I worked on. That’s six years’ work, and now it’s all gone.”

  Mr. Doyle was only 26 when he became the pusher, or foreman, of a raising gang on 1 World Trade Center, the north tower. Working with one of the eight tower cranes that rose with the buildings, he and his five-man gang lifted huge steel columns and girders off the backs of trucks, swung them into place and secured them with bolts. Mr. Doyle stayed on the job from foundation to summit. And when it came time to top out—a old tradition of ironwork—it was Mr. Doyle’s gang that raised the American flag on the final piece of high steel. The year was 1970.

  “It’s still hard to believe it’s gone,” Mr. Doyle said. “It’s like they ripped a big section out of my scrapbook. Of course, it’s nothing compared to what some people are suffering. You can always build another building.”

  New York Bends, But Doesn’t Break

  By CLYDE HABERMAN | September 16, 2001