THE NORTHEAST
(See Cover)
In the crisp, clear air 33,000 ft. over Pennsylvania, United Airlines Pilot Dale Chapman blinked in disbelief. There, one moment, were the myriad lights of Manhattan winking in the distance like diamonds on a jeweler's velvet cloth. An instant later, there was only blackness. "The whole city of New York was missing," marveled Chapman. "It looked like the end of the world."
For Lufthansa Pilot Reinhard Noethel, bringing in a 707 jetliner from Cologne at 39,000 ft., it was the same story—almost. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced on the intercom, "on the left side you can see Boston." Noethel looked out the left side and gasped. "All I could see," he said later, "were some blue lights."
By then, a silent avalanche of night had engulfed most of the Northeast. Cascading west, south and east from the Niagara Falls region, the electronic eclipse swept over an area only slightly smaller than Great Britain: 80,000 sq. mi., embracing parts of eight U.S. states and most of Canada's Ontario province. In 12 bewildering minutes—in less time than it would take an intercontinental missile to reach the U.S. from Russia−30 million people were plunged into blackness and bewilderment. And, in a society that has peered at the moon's hidden face and unlocked the secrets of matter, its origins seemed as impenetrable as the great blackout itself.
Squiggly Lines. The first hint that the Northeast's huge CANUSE (for Canadian-U.S. Eastern interconnection) power grid was in trouble came at 5:16 p.m. Moving clockwise, millions of kilowatts of electricity were coursing through the vast network of cables to meet the early-evening needs of the Western Hemisphere's most heavily populated, most power-dependent region. In the humming central control room of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, ink pens tracing the flow of power suddenly shuddered. At the Rochester Gas & Electric Corp. on the other side of Lake Ontario, the dials on a wall lurched out of control.
A minute later, meters at the mammoth $737 million Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant—biggest in the hemisphere—also went wild. The power output surged from 1,500 megavolts to 2,250, then sank abruptly to zero. "The needle came clear off the paper!" exclaimed one engineer. "There were more squiggly lines than in an earthquake." Giant generators spun uncontrollably out of step, and overload switches sprang open.
Orange Scintilla. A few pinpoints of light shone through the all-enveloping shroud. Many areas of Vermont, with nearly 30 individual utility companies, withstood the tide. New Hampshire went black in only two heavily populated western sections. The Lake Placid, N.Y., resort area was saved by the grandiloquently named Paul Smith's Electric Light & Power & Railroad Co. A local generator kept New Haven, Conn., aglow. Such isolated Massachusetts communities as Holyoke, Braintree and Taunton never lost a watt, and windswept Nantucket Island, 30 miles off Cape Cod, kept going with a private power system installed in 1889.
One New Yorker saw what was coming. At Consolidated Edison's Energy Control Center on Manhattan's West Side, Engineer Edwin Nellis was monitoring a meter that records the amount of power flowing in from upstate