The Night the Lights Went Out

Borrowed Power

A power grid is the system that carries electricity from the plants that make it to the places that use it. Big wires on tall steel towers carry it long distances. Smaller lines bring it down your street.

By the 1960s, Americans couldn't get enough of it. Electric use had doubled about every ten years since World War Two. To keep up, power companies linked their systems together. If one company ran short, it could borrow power from a neighbor.

In the Northeast, utilities in New York, New England and the Canadian province of Ontario were tied into one big network.

That made the grid stronger. Most days.

But a connection runs both ways. If neighbors can send help down the line, they can send trouble down it too.

And on that cold November evening, the trouble started on the Canadian side.

5:16 and Eleven Seconds

On the Niagara River, in Queenston, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, stood a hydroelectric plant called Sir Adam Beck Number Two. It made electricity from falling water.

Five transmission lines carried its power north toward Toronto. Each one was guarded by a protective relay. That's an automatic switch, a lot like the circuit breaker in your house. If it senses too much power in a line, it cuts the line off to protect it.

Here's the strangest part of this whole story. That relay had been installed in 1951. It was last adjusted in 1963. In the two years since, the power moving over those lines had grown. The setting stayed where it was.

On that cold evening, the load crept past it.

At sixteen minutes and eleven seconds past five, the relay did exactly what it was set to do. It ordered a circuit breaker to disconnect one of the lines.

The line wasn't broken. Nothing was on fire. The switch was protecting a line from a danger that wasn't there.

Any sailor learns to respect a breaker. It's there to save the equipment. But a breaker only knows the number somebody gave it. It has no idea what kind of night it is.

And that one line, in that one second, was all it took.

Dominoes

When the line was cut, its power didn't just disappear. It shifted onto the other four lines heading north. They couldn't carry it. In less than three seconds, their relays tripped too.

Now the Beck plant had a huge amount of power and nowhere to send it north. So it surged the other way. At least one and a half billion watts poured east and south, across the Niagara River into New York State.

Lines along the way overloaded. More relays tripped. Generators fell out of step with each other and shut themselves down to avoid damage. Engineers have a name for this. A cascade. One failure causes the next, which causes the next.

The grid broke apart into islands. The darkness spread across southern Ontario, then much of New York State, then most of New England.

New York City's power company, Consolidated Edison, could have cut itself loose from its neighbors early. Instead, its operators tried to hold on and help prop up the network.

It was a generous instinct. It was also the industry's old rule. Years later, Joseph Swidler, who led the federal investigation, put it this way: "Traditionally, the rule was: never forsake load until the ship goes down."

But Con Edison's generators couldn't respond fast enough.

Which brings us back to that subway car.

Underground

At about twenty-seven minutes past five, New York City went dark. It was the peak of the evening commute.

The New York Times reported the next morning that about eight hundred thousand riders were caught in the subways. Trains stopped dead in the tunnels. Many riders sat for hours in the dark. Thousands more were stuck in office elevators, hanging between floors.

About a minute later, the blackout had reached its full size. Roughly eighty thousand square miles. About thirty million people.

That's twelve minutes, from one small switch in Ontario to the dark over most of the Northeast.

And this was 1965, in the middle of the Cold War. Plenty of people feared sabotage, or even an attack.

So picture all those people in the dark, with no idea why. What would they do?

By the Light of the Moon

Here's the part people remember most. The city didn't panic.

The moon that night was almost exactly full. It had peaked the night before. For most of New York City, the brightest light available was the moon.

And people stepped up. Ordinary New Yorkers stood in intersections and directed traffic. Neighbors passed around candles and flashlights. Some helped firefighters with rescues. Hospitals switched to their backup generators.

In the Navy, you learn that the first minutes after something goes wrong decide a lot. Panic spreads faster than almost anything. That night in New York, calm spread instead.

Crime didn't spike. Reports from the time say it actually fell. Only a small number of stores were looted. People would come to call it "the good blackout." Many shop owners were still inside their stores when the lights went out. And nobody had ever lived through a blackout like this, so most people figured the power would be back soon.

Thousands who couldn't get home slept in Grand Central Terminal, or in hotel lobbies.

Other places came back that evening. New York City waited the longest. Power started coming back around half past three in the morning, and parts of the city were dark for more than thirteen hours.

New York got through the night. But the harder question was still waiting. Could it happen again?

The Harder Question

That same night, President Lyndon Johnson sent a memo to Swidler, chairman of the Federal Power Commission, the federal agency that oversaw the power industry. Johnson wrote that the failure "should be immediately and carefully investigated in order to prevent a recurrence." He put the FBI and the Defense Department at the commission's service.

It didn't take long to show this was no enemy. The problem was inside the grid itself.

On December 6th, less than a month later, the commission delivered its report. It traced the trigger back to that one relay at Sir Adam Beck. Within days of the blackout, Ontario Hydro had already raised the settings.

But the report also asked why the failure spread so far. The answers weren't comfortable. Control centers and power plants depended on the same grid power that had just disappeared. Some generating stations had no emergency power of their own to restart.

President Johnson said the goal was to make failures like this "not only improbable but impossible."

But the lesson of 1965 is that a system can be strong and fragile at the same time. Nearly everything we depend on today runs on that grid. Phones. Water pumps. Hospitals. The internet. Someone has to plan for the night one small switch does exactly what it was told.

At a news conference at the President's Texas ranch that day, Swidler presented the report. Nearly every fix in it was up to the power companies themselves. So a reporter asked. What happens if they don't make the changes? Who makes sure they do?

Swidler's answer was plain. "There is no authority now to ensure that these recommendations will be followed. We expect a very high degree of cooperation."

The power companies did move. In January 1966, utilities across the region formed the Northeast Power Coordinating Council. Con Edison bought gas turbine generators that could start on their own. Utilities installed automatic load shedding, cutting off some customers on purpose to save the rest.

In 1968, the industry created a national reliability council. For decades, its rules were voluntary.

In 1977, New York City went dark again. This time there was no good blackout. There was widespread looting and arson. In August 2003, about fifty million people lost power in the Northeast, the Midwest and Ontario. The worst blackout North America had ever seen.

Only then did Congress act. Since June 18th, 2007, the reliability rules for the American power grid have been mandatory, with real fines for breaking them.

As a Navy veteran, I can tell you a ship never takes her electrical power for granted. Crews drill for losing it, and ships are designed to shed less important loads so the vital ones stay on. Nobody waits for the ship to go down. It took the grid forty-two years, and three dark nights, to learn the same thing.

On that November night in 1965, a packed subway car sat stopped dead in a dark tunnel under New York, and up on the street, the brightest light in the city was the moon.

Tomorrow: the Continental Congress calls for two battalions of Marines, and a Philadelphia tavern claims to be where it all began. Did it? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe, and keep a light on for the next one. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.