Blackout Diary
Aug. 17th, 2003 03:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jim_pWe had been wanting to get to New York for quite some time to take in the museums and maybe a show. While the local art museum offers an annual day-trip, we really wanted to be able to spend a couple of days in the city. Our chance came when we'd accumulated enough bonus points on a credit card to cash them in for two free nights in a New York hotel. The details of the trip to the city and the hotel "experience" will be subjects of another posting....
It was Thursday, August 14, and we were on our second day of museum-hopping. We'd just settled in to view some Ethiopian artifacts at the American Museum of Natural History when suddenly and with no warning the entire exhibit hall went pitch black. Apparently there are parts of the museum with no emergency lighting, and we were completely blind. By dead reckoning and following walls, I made my way over to Tam. She carries a lot in her bag, including a dynamo flashlight. This enabled us to make our way out of the exhibit hall. Some folks used their cellphones and PDAs as impromptu flashlights as well.
Fortunately, the main hall of the museum had emergency lighting, and folks gathered there for a while not quite knowing what to do with themselves. At this point the scope of the outage wasn't known. I was assuming it was a building-wide outage -- maybe a breaker or transformer blew from overuse -- but nobody seemed to know. We found another exhibit hall that had some lighting and hung out there until more was known.
After about ten minutes more *was* known, as museum guards swept through the hall clearing it out - shouting something I couldn't quite make out about a fairly wide power outage and that they were clearing the building. Eventually they swept everyone out, but some folks stopped and asked about refunds even though it was obvious they had no way to process them. They told said people to pick up a museum brochure and send in their dated tickets to the address there for a refund. I may just write in and ask that our admission price be credited towards a membership instead -- we'll still get in free next time, they're a great institution, and they sure could use the money.
Out on the street, we notice a couple of things: first, traffic lights are dark as far as we can see. Second, we hear lots of sirens and see lots of emergency vehicles heading every which way (mostly downtown, but that's only because we were on Seventh Avenue and that's the direction it goes). Our plan for the day was originally going to be to visit museums during the day, then see what shows might be available for last-minute discounts at the TKTS booth for that evening. Since both our hotel and TKTS are near Times Square, we figured we'd head in that direction. Only question was: subway or bus? At this point, remember, we did not know the scope of the outage. At first we thought it might just be the Museum buildings (maybe the transformer blew). Then we thought it might be a several-block area (after seeing the dark traffic lights). The bus was slower but would bring us closer to our destination, so we went to the bus stop -- along with a lot of other people. At that point, I noticed all the storefronts were dark and storekeepers milling around on the sidewalk. Someone else at the bus stop, listening to the radio on headphones, mentioned something about a "failure at Niagara Falls". That's when I realized that this was no local outage but obviously a massive grid failure.
We mentioned the Niagara Falls bit to some other folks waiting at the bus stop in hopes of calming down some of the wilder speculation taking place. It was then interesting to hear the story mutate before our very ears as one Noo Yawker repeated it to another and then another.
As we waited for the bus, I marveled at how relatively smoothly traffic flowed despite the traffic lights being out. At least up in this part of Manhattan where the streets-and-avenues grid structure is nice and uniform, a routine quickly settled in: clusters of crosstown traffic would alternate with clusters of downtown traffic. What helped enormously is that there's a special traffic law in NYC -- stopping in the middle of an intersection is practically a capital offense (it's called "blocking the box" and it results in a big fine and an insurance penalty). As a result, New Yorkers are trained never to enter an intersection unless they can see their way clear across, thus alleviating gridlock. I'd LOVE to see this implemented in Boston!
Even though we were only about half an hour into the blackout, the ripple effects were already being felt. The first M7 bus to come by our stop drove right on by, packed full. The next one, fortunately, wasn't so full and we could get on. We had a trip of just under 40 blocks ahead of us, from 82nd street to 47th street. After a few more stops, I couldn't get Weird Al's Another One Rides The Bus out of my head. Soon this bus too was packed so full that it was no longer picking up passengers, and the driver announced that the end of the line would be at 42nd street (normally this bus runs down to 14th street). I suggested to my fellow passengers that they were probably breaking the bus route into two half-routes because with this crowding there was no way any bus was going to make it from one end of the line to the other. Traffic was getting thicker and more congested and crazier as we got further downtown too. I whiled away the time chatting with some fellow passengers about electrical grids, how the phones keep running (landline central offices have both backup generators and big whonking 48-volt battery banks), how some subway systems can keep running on their own generating plants (but I later found that NYC wasn't one of them), and the like.
We finally bailed out around 49th street, and wandered in the general direction of our hotel. Given what we knew of 1965 and 1977, we figured power wasn't likely to come back for at least a number of hours. We saw a lot of folks camped out in the lobby of our hotel, wondering what to do next. Since we figured we didn't want to make the 10-story climb back to our room any more often than we had to (and we were lucky it was only on the 10th story!) we wandered back out into the street. We stopped in a nearby convenience store that had moved some iced displays to the front; bought some sushi (no raw fish!) and bottled water, then found a place to park ourselves and nosh. After a while someone brought over a boom box tuned to a news station, and we tried to get as much information as we could. Not surprisingly, hard facts were sketchy enough at this point that they were filling the air with human interest stories.
One of our biggest worries at this point was figuring out what was going on on the home front. We had no idea of the full extent of the outage, and we didn't know if Boston was included. All of the stories we heard mentioned cities north and west of NYC (Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Ottawa), but nothing about Massachusetts. We had pets at home, and we had left an air conditioner running in one room so they'd have a refuge if it got hot. We also had arranged for a friend to come in and feed them a few times while we were gone. We tried numerous times to get in touch with said friend. Needless to say, getting a cellphone call through was dicey at best, and the one time we did get through all we got was her voicemail. We left a message and hoped for the best, but what we really needed was one bit of information: Are the lights on at home, or aren't they? Finally Tam asked me, "What about our answering machine?" Turns out our answering machine has no battery backup; it runs on wall current. Therefore, if we were to call it and it were to pick up, we'd know that the lights were on. We called, it answered, and we were much relieved.
As twilight began to set, we decided we didn't have much better to do, so we made our way back to the hotel. Along the way we snapped a few photos in the last good light; a couple of pictures of darkened Times Square billboards, and one of a Guardian Angel directing traffic. Finally we got to the hotel and "climbed the mountain" for the first time. True to this hotel's lack of amenities, it had minimal emergency lighting in the lobby and none in the stairwells. Thank heavens once again for Tam's dynamo flashlight. Climb up ten stories, collapse into the room.
Try to figure out how to defeat the safety on the windows that only allows you to open them a few inches. Succeed. Get some air. Collapse on bed. Doze off, fitfully.
Our dozing is occasionally interrupted by bouts of whooping and cheering from Times Square. After hearing a few rounds of this, we feel we might be missing Something Really Big -- History In The Making, or at the very least a pretty cool spontaneous block party or something. So we climb back down and wander around Times Square again... we see a fair bit of milling about, but not the bacchanal that the cheering implied might be taking place. Some shops and restaurants are operating as best they can under the circumstances, by candlelight or generator power. Some guys on bicycles came on through telling people that the real party was on 49th & 6th with a DJ and everything, so we wandered in that direction... as did the NYPD mounted contingent. By the time we got there the DJ was still spinning but at a subtler volume. Not that it mattered, the crowd consensus was clearly that it was too hot to dance anyway.
I wondered what happened to all those folks who bought generators in anticipation of the Y2K Catastrophe. Did they turn around and sell them when the recession hit and they needed the cash? Did New Yorkers not bother, somehow thinking it wouldn't happen to them?
Thing is, there was light to be had, at least near Times Square. In addition to a nearly full moon, a lot of midtown buildings did have some emergency power, which shed some light on the streets below. Some streetlights were also lit as well, possibly fed from the same building feeds in a bizarre municipal back-scratching arrangement. Emergency vehicles were dispatched everywhere, flashing lights of their own. Finally, the police were klieg-lighting key intersections possibly to avoid the kinds of lawlessness that were seen in the 1977 blackout.
We make our way back to Times Square, and finally figure out what all the whooping and hollering was about. It's just after 11PM, and the guy from Channel 4 News is just about to go live. When the camera rolls, a crowd gathered behind him goes positively ape, trying perhaps for their 15 milliseconds of fame. The poor Channel 4 guy is probably thiking "I'd rather be embedded in Iraq than have to put up with these yahoos!". We snap a picture of the scene, then head back to our hotel to "climb the mountain" once more.
I feel bad for Tam; without power, I can't use my CPAP machine and so I must be snoring pretty badly (and she's a light sleeper). I wake a few times during the night... "Are we there yet", I mean, "Do we have power yet"? By 8AM or so it's clear that nothing's going to change anytime soon and our best bet is to check out of the hotel and get out of Dodge.
We have tickets for the 5:40PM train from NYC to Boston that afternoon. We figure we'd get to Penn Station and see what we could do. We buy another couple of bottles of water (now $3/liter) and hoof it the twelve blocks to Penn Station. The Seventh Avenue entrance is blocked by a whole line of police, who politely inform us that we can use the Eighth Avenue entrance. We get in and find that some systems are actually running on emergency power, including the Departures/Arrivals screens. After a while, though, it becomes clear that the screens have nothing to do with reality. The screens show some Boston trains as running "On Time", while the announcement says "There is NO Boston Service At This Time". Passengers for one particular Boston train are told to gather at "33rd and 8th", but the Amtrak guy there doesn't know what they're there for. By noon it's clear that we'd either have to take a HUGE gamble that things would be back to normal by the time 5:40 rolled around, or we'd better find another way out of town. I said "That gives us five hours to try the Port Authority [Bus Terminal] and get back here". Since that was only about eight blocks away, it was worth a try.
We hoofed our way to the Port Authority terminal. The terminal itself was closed, but there were buses everywhere. They seemed to be loading and departing through the central 41st street tunnel that goes straight through the terminal. Thing is, there was no obvious way to buy tickets, and NOBODY seemed to have a fucking clue as to how things were working. Finally in desperation we figured we'd just join the crowd for the next Boston-bound bus and hash it out with the driver. Throw him cash, credit cards, anything.
Turns out they'd kinda-sorta worked out a procedure; you could either give the driver a valid ticket or a photo ID. At the next ticketing station (Hartford in our case) you could buy a ticket and get your ID back. Worked for us!
Traffic was horrendous getting to Hartford; I guess everyone got the same idea at the same time. Still, to be making progess towards Boston was such a relief, I even put up with the horrendous movies they played on the bus ("The Parent Trap" and "Mr. Deeds", if you must know). At least on airplanes, you can decline the optional headphones and close your eyes and spare yourself the experience if you want; on buses they just blast the sound at you whether you want it or not.
Finally, FINALLY we got to South Station in Boston. Since in Boston the bus station is right next to the Amtrak station, we walked over and asked if we could get a refund for the train tickets we couldn't use. Yes, we certainly could, which more than covered the bus fare AND the Chinese take-out we treated ourselves to just before collapsing in exhaustion...
All in all, I'd have to say we were damned lucky. We weren't trapped for hours on a subway or elevator, we didn't have to walk many miles over the Brooklyn Bridge to get home like a lot of folks did, and we didn't have to figure out how to get into town to get to our jobs the next day like a bellhop at our hotel. Whatever discomforts I mention, I acknowledge they pale before those who endured much much more just trying to live another day in the Big Apple...
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