Blackout of the Decade:
The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965
Chloe Belant
Junior Division
Historical Paper
Paper Length: 1544 Words
The only thing you could see for miles was dark, not even a finger was visible. —Stephanie Quaker, New York Times editor. Although it was 55 years ago, The Northeast Blackout of 1965 is still remembered as, “The day of darkness” (Wentwirth,2010). A day where the afternoon turned into night and many people were left in darkness. In the year 1965, on the day of November 9th at around 5:27 p.m., an interference caused voltage through lines across New York and all through the Northeast side of the U.S. to have massive power deduction by almost 4 kilowatts which at the time caused a brown out. A kilowatt is a measurement of power. It has a measurement of 1,000 watts. After almost 4 minutes, “Of slow water pressure and dimmed lights throughout the house, we knew something was up,” says Randy Willmings, a resident of New York at the time. Soon after all lines lost voltage, the city of New York became dark. Many Americans were stuck in subways or train stations and many were gathered in telephone lines to call loved ones.
The blackout lasted over 13 hours and covered nearly 800,000 long miles stretching from northeast side of Massachusetts up into Ontario Canada where the power failure originated from.
Over 30 million people were affected and up to 1,000 fires went ablaze after power became
overloaded at one transformer. “It was a day of definite fights with fire,” says Chief Macdonald of the Massachusetts volunteer fire dept. Not only were there fires but property damage was huge. Over
¾ or 75% of all tax money in America that year went towards damages such as emergency services
(14.6 million), property damages (120 million), and 2.2 million taken from a towns revenue to help rebuild the economy and repair lines. Repair men were on duty 24 hours a day repairing remaining lines and tearing down old ones to replace them. “We weren’t paid enough for the jobs we worked on,” said John Samuelson CEO of Brieners electric LLC. (CBS news,2006). “Many people don’t know exactly what happened, some don’t even know who stole the light from us on that day,” said ABC news Laura O’Donnell. One thing many people knew was that the outage was tracked and pinpointed at the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation in Ontario, Canada.
After his shift started, Scierra Bungle, a historian at the Smithsonian reports that a man named
Frederick Valentine was monitoring the voltage in the southbound lines (towards northeast U.S.) when a monitor alarm tripped setting off a loud beeping noise. Frederick at the time was new to this job, and due to his novice training, he didn’t know what to do with this alarm so he started pushing random buttons and flipping switches. Soon the alarms stopped and Frederick began to calm down again. He thought everything was fine, but that was not the case.(Bungle, 2014
Interview previewed at Smithsonian).
Over the treacherous 13 hours of darkness, ⅓ of the workplace stayed home. 2000 people were trapped in subways or trains. One witness Samantha Mahone was stuck inside a train car for 2 hours straight with her 3 ill children.“Everyone was frustrated and upset about the situation at one point we preyed, we had no idea what was going to happen to us.” Others like Suarez Czech said “The only thing visible in front of you was flashlights shining from others nearby and car lights.” One of the most important monuments based in New York City was still alive the Statue of Liberty and her beautiful glowing torch shined brightly, it didn’t help patrons physically but mentally it reminded
them of patriotism. The blackout “was the 15th largest in the U.S. so far, the first largest occurred in August of 2003 which caused 1500 power outages nationwide and 230 brownouts” (Schneider, 2006). The Niagara Mohawk power corporation at the time had a net worth of over 40 million dollars and supplied power to 25 of the 50 states and even parts of Canada. After over 15 years of powering cities and states in the United States, they were shut down. Olive, now age 75, worked at the factory at the age of 20. This is what she said on the topic, “Nearly 30 thousand people lost their jobs and several found themselves without homes, this was devastating for all of us”(ABC News, 2002). The scandal started after the blackout of 1965 ended and many people started to wonder who was responsible and became furious. Once they’d found out it was due to training inefficiency, lawsuit papers began to pour in. According to Ava Sanchez a reporter for CNN News, “The company became encased in over 30,000 lawsuit papers of angry citizens from all over the northeast and Canada. The company winded up paying over 200,000 dollars. In addition having to redo all of the power lines within 20,000 miles. Stretching from Massachusetts to New York City” (CNN News, 2009). After the almost 16 hour blackout, people began to settle back into normal life, but the power companies chaos was just getting started. When they began to redo power lines, over 24,000 workers were needed and only 19,000 were present because of how many people they had fired so they started asking people to volunteer to help out. “Many people didn’t want to get involved in such a situation due to lack of training, which caused this issue in the first place,” states William Price, but soon they had enough volunteers to begin their reconstruction (CBS News, 2009).“Power lines had to first be cut off their power and then unconnected from transformers before removal was allowed,” says Matthew Stockwitz, a volunteer who spoke during a news broadcast for Good Morning America (June 18th, 1989).
More than 200 patrons of New York helped come together to restore power grids after the incident. “Why? Many people asked us workers,” states Brandon Mills, a line worker who worked at
Mohawk power for over 12 years (CNN News, 2009).The reason many lines we repaired was because during the massive outage some transformers on lines overhead of busy towns and streets didn’t receive a special code stating that the lines had been compromised. “By the time we realized it most of the grids had been fried,” adds Brandon. “This happened because of a malfunction in the emergency code, all systems through Mohawk power Corp had an alarm system for line override that malfunctioned during the incident” ( ABC News, 2006). As a result a massive amount of over 25,000 power grids and over 23,000 fried power lines. According to Jason Ansfield,. “Each power line per yard costs around $3,000 dollars plus an installment fee, all of the power grids had to be re manufactured at a higher voltage and new alarm systems had to be installed” (Mohawk ,2002). This caused a massive management and maintenance bill to be made.
Mohawk power corporation ended up paying a hefty bill of nearly 1 million dollars.
Making huge changes to their power plants the CEO of Mohawk power at the time LJ O’Connor made it apparent that the establishment wouldn’t have the funds for their troubles but many people, furious over the situation pushed it upon them. A quote taken from a news broadcast captures their disparity, “ We unfortunately can’t supply to this power crisis and will continue once funds are recovered,” (Kupple, 1976). Soon after the announcement was made that they had no funds people rebelled against them and the company fell into bankruptcy. A few news broadcasts were filmed but no one could watch, yet. “Stubbornly, because that’s who we were, we decided to do a broadcast anyway. By candlelight, NBC anchor Frank McGee talked about the blackout in a program sent by line down to Washington. Jim Hartz reported [without film] about his travels through the congested streets of Manhattan,” (NBCNews.org, 2011).
New York is known for many power outages because of the amount of voltage used for running signs and other light related sequences, “On average New York uses 25 kilowatts of power just for their LED signs” (Bradley, 2017). After this major event, there have been several since one of
the largest blackouts recently on this side of the U.S. It also originated in New York in 2003 in the month of August. Almost 3 times the people of the 1965 blackout were affected and several hundred thousand power lines went dead. Not only that but over 24 states were affected by this power inefficiency. The blackout of 2003 made records making it into the top 13 worst power outages in the world because of 100 fatalities compared to the 15 in 1965. In conclusion, the northeast blackout of 1965 helped break the barrier of how we sustain energy. It was the 15th largest blackout in the world and revolutionized power as we know it, giving us better alarm systems and making us more aware of what power can do. Therefore, we shouldn’t take power for granted and learn to understand its abilities because it could do without it much damage could occur. Bibliography:
Primary resources:
“The Great Northeast B lackout.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 4 Mar. 2010, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-great-northeast-blackout.
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“The Northeast Blackout of 1965: Historical Events.” Learning History, 9 Nov. 2019, www.learning-history.com/northeast-blackout-of-1965-historical-events/.
Secondary resources:
November 9, 2016. “Northeast Blackout of 1965.” Piney Woods News, pineywoods.news/northeast-blackout-1965/.
Pressman, Gabe. “Remembering When the Lights Went Out in 1965.” NBC New York, NBC New York, 8 Nov. 2011, www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/when-the-lights-went-out-in-1965/1932524/.
Salazar, Cristian, and Cristian Salazar. “When NYC Went Dark in 1965: The Great
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George. “Northeast Blackout of 1965.” UFOs Uncovered, UFOs Uncovered, 11 Jan. 2020, ufosuncovered.com/ufo-aftermath/northeast-blackout-of-1965.
“The Northeast Blackout of 1965.” Nydailynews.com, New York Daily News, 9 Nov. 2017, www.nydailynews.com/news/50-years-northeast-blackout-1965-gallery-1.2428539.