The blackout, 5 years on

It's been five years today since the Great Blackout of 2003, one of my favorite life events to reminisce about. I was there, in New York City, marveling at the chaos, liveblogging via cell phone...



...and, of course, taking lots of pictures.



As I wrote on the second anniversary, the blackout was "the ultimate 'I was there' moment for someone who really, really likes to be 'there' when interesting things happen." In fact, it remains "one of my very favorite life experiences, period. That may seem odd, but I’d always thought that it would be really cool to be in New York City during a massive power outage like the one they had in 1965. And on August 14, 2003, I found out that I was right. It was really cool."

My answer to the question "where were you?" can be found in my full account of the blackout, written the next day:

I was up on the 13th floor of the building in Tribeca where I work, sitting at my work computer — which happens to be a laptop — when the fan next to me stopped running, and the room got a lot quieter. My computer, being a laptop, seamlessly switched to battery power, so it took me a few seconds to realize that everyone else’s computer, not to mention everything else electric in the room, had shut off. Upon grasping this, I stolled out into the living room — our “office” is really a very large apartment where our husband-and-wife team of bosses, Lyn and Richard, live — to see whether Richard’s employees, who work in a separate area of the apartment, were affected too. I quickly ascertained that they were (and also glanced out the window and ascertained that nothing seemed amiss in the Midtown skyline). Not long after this, Richard proclaimed — I have no idea where he got his information — that the “whole building,” a 17-story structure that is also home to Mariah Carey, was out of power.

I went back to Lyn’s area, where I work, and started typing out a cell phone photo-post announcing that our office had lost power and we had reports that the whole building might be out. In the midst of typing this, Lyn came in and said that one of Richard’s employees had said the whole city, plus Long Island and New Jersey, was out. My immediate reaction was extreme skepticism: I asked who the employee had heard this from, and where that person had gotten his information. Lyn didn’t know, so I typed something into my cell phone that was extremely wishy-woshy on the point of whether city was out of power — I didn’t want to mislead anyone with gossip. :)

But then when I tried to put up the post online, my phone wouldn’t connect. I tried several times, with no luck. ... [Then] I tried to call the Audioblog phone number, and couldn’t get through. I tried this repeatedly, but no luck. It began to seem more and more plausible that the whole city was out of power — and that, like on 9/11, everyone was reaching for their cell phones at the same time, jamming the network.

We had no TV and no Internet, of course ... [but] it quickly became clear from the glut of traffic, the honking, and the sirens that were visible and/or audible outside our windows that something was happening beyond just our building. The extent became clear when I finally got through via phone to my dad: in what one of my co-workers later described as a “surreal moment,” I repeated aloud the names of affected cities that my dad was reading to me from a CNN article: Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Albany, Toronto, Ottawa.

Later, I describe how I turned down an offer to stay at a co-worker's apartment in Greenwich Village (I worked downtown but lived on 190th Street, about ten miles away), because "this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I wanted to really experience it. I had always wondered, somewhat jealously, what it must have been like for New Yorkers in ‘65 and ‘77 to see this city in the dark, and now was my chance. So, without any clear idea where I would be sleeping or what I would do once it got fully dark, I started walking toward Times Square."

Read the whole thing. And here's my Flickr gallery of blackout photos. A few highlights:







Various anniversary-themed news articles are out today, including:

ABC News: "Five Years After Blackout: Electric Grid Still Vulnerable"

Associated Press: "5 years after a giant blackout, are we better off?"

Scientific-American: "The 2003 Northeast Blackout--Five Years Later"

Canadian Press: "Repeat of massive 2003 blackout less likely today, says power overseer"