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Bailed Out. In New York City, the U.S. Navy helped speed the recovery. From the Bayonne, N.J., Naval Supply Center came two portable generators to restart a Con Ed steam plant in Queens. The destroyer U.S.S. Bristol, which had been lying to in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, crossed the East River and delivered needed cable to another plant. Still, power in Con Ed's area was the last to be fully reestablished; the blackout in most of New York City and adjacent Westchester County lasted up to 13 hours, continued in isolated pockets all through the next day.
FPC investigating teams were dispatched to headquarters of the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., which operates in upstate New York, and to Con Edison's Manhattan headquarters. Then, two days after the blackout, Government power experts and executives of the 20 major utility companies that make up CANUSE—83 in all—gathered in the commission's Washington headquarters to find out how the thing that few thought would ever happen had come about.
No Evidence. Not one utility expert could offer an explanation as to what touched off the U.S.'s greatest blowout. Company executives unanimously reported no faulty equipment; each maintained that his operation was normal prior to the trouble. Said Paul Mehrtens, president of Western Massachusetts Electric: "Our real problem is that we don't know enough to explain it. We are doing what they do after an airline crash—getting all the pieces back into the hangar and putting them together."
Nevertheless, enough pieces were in to permit some educated guesses. By all odds, the trouble started in the Lake Ontario region, scene of the first power failure or "outage" (which some newspapers felicitously misprinted as "outrage"). Power in this area flows clockwise in a loop running from Syracuse to Niagara, Toronto, Massena, N.Y., and back to Syracuse (see map). Just before the blackout, the flow reversed; Ontario Hydro was jolted when voltage that Toronto usually relays toward Massena suddenly started coming from Massena. Seconds later the loop failed.
In all probability, the system fell victim to a phenomenon known as "cascading"—a sort of galloping high blood pressure in electricity arteries. In the Eastern U.S., alternating electric current pulsates through wires in waves of 60 cycles per second. When there is a sudden drain on the line, power rushes in to make up for the loss, but there is a tendency in such cases for the waves to pile up on each other in wild, evergrowing oscillations that carom through the circuit. If cascading gets serious enough, it triggers the "domino effect" —the automatic opening, one after the other, of safety switches that prevent damage to the system. Unless the energy pool can dampen such turbulence, the only way a member of the circuit can be protected from the cascading hypertension is to quarantine itself by cutting away from the whole system.
"Hell of a Flick." The mystery was who or what first pulled the plug that started the loop drain—it could have been anything from a generator feeding power at the wrong frequency to a switch thrown in error by a