Cities: Anniversary of The Night

In Manhattan, guests at a round of parties will sip their drinks in the dark.

In Boston, Harvard students planned a series of lights-out beer busts. For stay-at-homes, a chain of New York novelty shops offered a kit containing 50 “I Was There” buttons and a candle. Most of the 30 million Americans who lived through history’s biggest blackout a year ago this week approached the first anniversary of The Night with a certain nostalgia. The memory also prompted a more practical concern. What, if any thing, has been done to prevent another failure on the scale of the 1965 eclipse that plunged 80,000 sq. mi. of the U.S.

Northeast and Canada into Stygian darkness?

The area’s power companies have belatedly mounted a massive effort to overhaul, augment and modernize equipment and procedures. At the On tario Hydro-Electric Power Commission’s Sir Adam Beck Plant No. 2, where the region-wide short circuit originated in an overloaded relay fuse, more relays have been added to in crease the system’s safety margin. To prevent the area’s vast, interlocking power grid from being pulled down again, newly designed switches have been installed in northwestern New York State so that the southern part of the system can automatically cut itself off from the pool.

Generators & Computers. Through out the area, electric companies have bought oil-fueled “black start” generators to help reactivate giant turbines more quickly. Some companies are making plans to install computers programmed to monitor loads and correct “cascading” frequencies of the kind touched off by the Beck blowout. New York’s Kennedy International Airport, whose runway lights vanished before the eyes of bewildered jet captains, has put in eight diesel generators that can kick on within twelve seconds.

Many Manhattan skyscrapers are now equipped with emergency power for elevators, in which thousands of New Yorkers were trapped, and auxiliary lighting for the stairs down which many more thousands had to escape.

Much still remains to be done. The New York City subway system, in which 800,000 passengers were stranded last fall, has yet to set up its own emergency power system or even a lighting plant. On the basis of the lessons learned from the blackout, both the Federal Power Commission and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation strongly endorsed a bill in Congress this year that would have given the FPC greater control over power-grid planning. The measure died, largely be cause the utilities lobby opposed it. And though — until 1965 — utility companies had for years denied that a major black out could happen, they now concede that a repeat is by no means impossible.