Back from the Black-out

Some peo­ple will say that the black-out was no big deal and for most, it wasn’t but it belied a num­ber of crit­i­cal issues. Today, less than 24 hours after our elec­tric­ity was restored (for the record, 28th street between Lex­ing­ton and 3rd Avenue got its elec­tric­ity back on Fri­day at 9:45pm), I am think­ing about some of the scenes I wit­nessed in this his­tor­i­cal event. First of all, I was impressed by how cool and col­lected every­one was. While there are many rec­ol­lec­tions of the black-out here’s mine. (granted, I’m post­ing this late but I just fin­ished mak­ing sure that every­one was OK on this end and replug­ging and gen­er­ally dig­ging under from the mad­ness of the past few days).

Thurs­day was a reg­u­lar day at the office… until about 4pm. At a few min­utes ’til 4pm, some­thing hap­pened to the lights in our build­ing. I was look­ing at my com­puter screen and noticed a slight dim. As I was won­der­ing whether this was due to lack of cof­fee or a sugar low, or just gen­eral dizzi­ness due to too many hours star­ing at the screen, the lights went out for a few sec­onds, and every com­put­ers went dead. A few sec­onds later, the power came back up in the build­ing. Across the street, above the build­ing in which our web servers are hosted, a giant cloud of black smoke erupted. It was at that point I real­ized we had not only lost elec­tric­ity for a few sec­onds but were now run­ning on bor­rowed time. My phone rang. It was my wife call­ing to tell me that they had lost power in her office. I told her to stay put and that we would talk soon.

Mean­while, the build­ing fire alarm went off. A mes­sage telling us to evac­u­ate the build­ing was stream­ing through the dif­fer­ent alarm sys­tem. After mak­ing sure that every­one on my team was head­ing out, I made my way down the 11th flights of stairs, no real big deal. As we got down­stairs, I tried to call Amy. Phone sig­nal at that point was already spotty (as thou­sands, if not mil­lions of cell phone users tried to make sim­i­lar calls). I sent Amy a text mes­sage instead and this would be our pri­mary form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion over the next few hours. The won­ders of text mes­sag­ing is that their light load tends to trump phone calls, mak­ing them eas­ier to carry on over­loaded net­works. The same is true for most kind of data traf­fic cur­rently avail­able on either GSM or GPRS ser­vice. Based on that idea, I decided to try to get a lit­tle news. Every­one was get­ting a lit­tle edgy, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing our past expe­ri­ences with Sep­tem­ber 11th. The ques­tion on everyone’s mind was, of course, whether it was ter­ror­ism. We didn’t know. I tried to calm peo­ple down by telling them that we could only assume the best for now.

A con­nec­tion to CNN.com pro­vided a few more details, high­light­ing the fact that other major cities were under the same kind of con­di­tions. This made us all feel bet­ter as it pro­vided some basic deduc­tion that Indian Point, the local nuclear power sta­tion, was not the only part to have blown up. After 15–20 min­utes, CNN had a full report with the men­tion that ter­ror­ism had been ruled out. With this in mind, and based on the fact that things were not going to be fixed any time soon, I headed for the Ferry land­ing with a few co-workers. There, peo­ple waited patiently to get their tick­ets. One of the thing I must add in order to explain that kind of behav­ior is that most of the peo­ple now work­ing in the neigh­bor­hood I work in (the Pavo­nia New­port Cen­ter in Jer­sey City) had been relo­cated there after Sep­tem­ber 11th. As a result, many of them were actu­ally vet­er­ans of that last dis­as­ter and real­ized that the best way to behave was to be calm.

Appar­ently, that les­son had been lost on some peo­ple on the other side of the river. When we arrived to the 38th street Ferry Land­ing (about 6:30pm), thou­sands and thou­sands of peo­ple were try­ing to do the reverse trip into Jer­sey. Many of them were very unruly and my fel­low pas­sen­gers and I had to fight our way through the crowd to get out of the area. At that point, my best guess esti­mate is that there were close to 5000 peo­ple con­gre­gat­ing in the area. Con­sid­er­ing the poten­tially dan­ger­ous com­bi­na­tion of large crowds and pissed off peo­ple, I decided to head back home by the least crowded route. I assumed side streets would be less crowded than main arter­ies and that the bike path along the west side might be the best way to move south quickly. Within a few min­utes I was on 28th street, walk­ing east from the river.

The street was a lit­tle eerie. While I have left behind throngs of peo­ple, I now found myself in a neigh­bor­hood that was com­pletely deserted. For two blocks I walked with­out bump­ing into another soul (a glance up and down the avenues showed that peo­ple were still con­gre­gat­ing north on 34th street and south on 23rd). By the time I made it to 10th avenue, the crowds had returned. There, civil­ians had stepped in, attempt­ing to replace the traf­fic lights by direct­ing what could only be described as traf­fic pan­de­mo­nium. Every car in every direc­tion wanted to move. Some cars were try­ing to head the wrong way down streets and avenues. The result was total grid­lock. Once again, fig­ur­ing that I was plan­ning on get­ting home and wasn’t try­ing to be par­tic­u­larly heroic, I walked on.

A few min­utes later, I was on the cor­ner of 28th street and Lex­ing­ton. There, only half a block from home, I felt I could con­tribute and started try­ing to direct traf­fic. Let me just say that this lit­tle expe­ri­ence (only about 45 min­utes worth of work) gave me new respect for traf­fic cops. First of all, when direct­ing traf­fic, one real­izes that try­ing to get a car dri­ver to do your bid­ding, when you’re just a foot sol­dier, is not as easy as it seems. For starters, cars are big­ger than you are. Sec­ondly, car dri­vers do not really care that much for pedes­tri­ans try­ing to tell them what to do. So a lot of work went into cajol­ing dri­vers into doing the right thing. Some did, got out of the inter­sec­tions, and let traf­fic through. Oth­ers (and I hope Dante has a par­tic­u­larly bad cir­cle of hell built up for those) could not be both­ered and had to have their way, gain­ing no advan­tage what­so­ever by mov­ing in the mid­dle of inter­sec­tions and block­ing traf­fic com­ing from main avenues.

Tired from try­ing to get all this mov­ing (and a lit­tle less opti­mistic about the good nature of dri­vers), I went home. Amy was wait­ing for me in the lobby, won­der­ing where I was (she had got­ten home a lot faster than me). We went up the dark stairs with a light lent to us by the door­man and, while there was still light out, gath­ered up can­dles, matches, flash­lights and oil lamps. After doing so, we filled up the bath­tubs with water, fig­ur­ing that water could be going next. We then called our par­ents and a few friends to reas­sure them that every­thing was OK. I asked mom to hit my site (TNL.net) and she told me it was down.

This all took a few hours, dur­ing which we brought more can­dles down to the lobby (due to our recent wed­ding, and our inde­ci­sion as to what the proper can­dle arrange­ment would be until the last minute, we found our­selves sit­ting on what could be con­sider a god­send on black­out day: a large col­lec­tion of can­dles) and Amy started to cook stuff that was in the freezer. We left our door open to throw some light in the hall­way and, every so often, a neigh­bor would stop by. We ended up hav­ing a mas­sive din­ner with one of our neigh­bors, dur­ing which we talked about just about any­thing but the black­out. One would hardly have known that we were in the mid­dle of a national cri­sis, save for the fact that a quick glance out the win­dow showed, well not much, it was dark.

Later that night, we went out for a quick walk around the neigh­bor­hood. Peo­ple had pulled out chairs, beers, and can­dles, and were gen­er­ally hang­ing out. The whole neigh­bor­hood had a party feel to it. A few bars and restau­rants were still open, cook­ing on bar­be­cues or run­ning through what­ever alco­hol they had. A few blocks down, a sushi place for offer­ing dol­lar sushi. To light their lit­tle stand, they had parked a car side­ways and were using the car head­lights. The streets, sur­pris­ingly, were more crowded than they are on a reg­u­lar day as a lot of peo­ple must have fig­ured that no light was the per­fect excuse to go bar-hopping. Down on 23rd street, National Guards­men were direct­ing traf­fic. Along Park avenue, a few build­ings (notably the New York Life Build­ing) were run­ning on gen­er­a­tor. With this quick obser­va­tion, we went back home, climbed up the 8 floors and went to bed.

The alarm clock on my Palm can be a very handy thing in a black-out. Just set up wake up as an event, set up the alarm and you’re done. I woke up at 7am on Fri­day, as usual. The only dif­fer­ence was that the elec­tric­ity was gone and my paper had not been deliv­ered. Drop­ping a bucket into the bath­tub and using a wash­cloth, I did my best to take a quick shower over the toi­let, using it as a drain. I then put on some clothes and went down to the com­puter room. The wire­less con­nec­tion from the Wi-Fi sta­tion pro­vided by Ver­i­zon seemed to be down. My own DSL router was use­less too. How­ever, the phone line was work­ing and the bat­tery on my lap­top was still good. I got online using a dialup line (for once, AOL picked up on the first ring, prob­a­bly because very few other peo­ple were try­ing to get online). There, I received an IM from Charles Rawls, who heads Dor­sai. He had got­ten juice back around 6am and was work­ing on bring­ing machines back up. One of those was TNL.net and I posted a quick mes­sage telling peo­ple I was fine. I sent shot a few work-related emails off, just in case I might not be able to reach peo­ple again. I also tried to reach a few of the sites we were host­ing at work. All of them were respond­ing OK so I knew that things were pretty much under con­trol at the office. How­ever, the site for our US divi­sion, the one where I might be able to get some infor­ma­tion as to who to con­tact in the US, was down.

I tried call­ing my boss, but he wasn’t answer­ing. One of the things we take for granted in this day and age is the ease of acces­si­bil­ity to peo­ple. Mobile phones give us direct access. Answer­ing machines give us delayed access. With­out elec­tric­ity, nei­ther is good. Mobile phone tow­ers only store elec­tric­ity for a few hours, a crit­i­cal flaw that, hope­fully, will be inves­ti­gated and resolved in the future. Answer­ing machines are pretty use­less with­out elec­tric­ity. I tried to reach other peo­ple at work but no one was avail­able. So I decided I would hike up to cor­po­rate head­quar­ters. Walk­ing up, I passed a few restau­rants that were serv­ing barbecue-cooked break­fast. I also passed a few banks that had employ­ees sit­ting around. Stop­ping by one of them to check on the ATMs, I learned that all ATMs were down, with sus­pi­cion that the whole ATM net­work may be out. This was bad news so I just tried to head straight to head­quar­ters where, if the ATM net­work was out, peo­ple like myself could be of use.

There, I was told that they didn’t have any infor­ma­tion, and was given a phone num­ber. I called but it was ring­ing busy. With noth­ing to do there, I decided to just head home again. On my way home, I passed a deli stand that was sell­ing the New York Times. I picked up a copy, fig­ur­ing that I could read that while redi­al­ing the busi­ness con­tin­gency line. Got home and started dial­ing. After a few hours of redi­al­ing, I gave up. A few hours later, my boss, hav­ing received email from me, called me and said that things were under con­trol and that the day was going to go on skele­ton staff. With no way to get to the office any­way, I fig­ured I would just stay home, which I did.

We read for a while and then started to get hun­gry. Food in the fridge was start­ing to spoil so we decided to throw that away. Through the infor­mal net­work of peo­ple chat­ting on the phone, we’d found out that other parts of town had power. So we headed out in search of elec­tric­ity, a lap­top and two cell­phones in a back­pack, and hopes that we would find a place with ATMs, elec­tric­ity and water. As we were walk­ing out on a power-rich part of town (lower 20s on the west side, around 4:30pm), Amy said that we might want to hike up to the upper west side, where her aunt and uncle had power). A quick call and we were up there, enjoy­ing the power of warm show­ers and avail­able out­lets). We then went to get some pre­pared food at a nearby store and headed back down to our neigh­bor­hood late in the evening. There, we sat down with some of our neigh­bors for din­ner. A few min­utes before our arrival, power had finally been restored, to the loud cheers of a neigh­bor­hood ready to rejoin civ­i­liza­tion). With pre­pared cooked foods and cham­pagne, we cel­e­brated our good for­tune, happy to have sur­vived the black­out of 2003.

Related Terms

More in Personal,Politics (5 of 5 articles)