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Personal Message: Beats the drum, rather, but interesting anyway. The philosophical attitude towards the blackout I've been looking for in the papers and not finding so much. Memories of 9/11 Add Perspective By David Von Drehle and Christine Haughney NEW YORK -- Hell is more than just a miserable inconvenience. Firefighter Steven Olsen has seen both, so he knows. On Friday, hot, sticky and tired, Olsen climbed nine flights of stairs to rescue a heavyset woman in a wheelchair from the downtown Manhattan office where she had been stranded overnight by the worst power outage in U.S. history. With three other firefighters, Olsen carried the woman and her chair all the way down. He couldn't help comparing it to the ninth floor in Hell. "All I remember was both her arms were burnt. She was standing on an elevator and the flames came out," Olsen said. It was Sept. 11, 2001, on the ninth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. "You couldn't grab her by the arms. You had to hold her under her arms," Olsen remembered. "It was a beautiful clear day like today," he recalled. Then it was "pitch blackness. You couldn't see nothing." Perhaps it would have been better if that had been literally true. If Olsen had seen nothing, he would not have memories of a horribly burned man weakly reaching toward him as if straining to hang on to life itself. "If I would've picked him up, he would have come apart," Olsen said, so the firefighter moved past that man to search for likelier survivors. If he had seen nothing, Olsen would not have memories of emerging from the tower just in time to see two falling bodies slam into the pavement right in front of him. Steve Olsen nearly died in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and that is why, when the power failed Thursday, his 13-year-old daughter pleaded with him not to go to work. "She was thinking that we were being attacked," he said. Olsen's wife and two other daughters also begged him to stay home. "They said they needed me." But Olsen went to work, because that's what firefighters do. 'A Very Different Place' Across New York, the sequence of emotions went something like this when the power failed at 4:11 p.m. on Thursday: Annoyance, first, when it was still possible to imagine that some bonehead had cut a cable or flipped the wrong switch somewhere in the immediate neighborhood. Then a flash of fear as the extent of the outage became apparent. Is this the next attack? Olsen didn't realize there was a massive power outage until he turned on the car radio on the way to the pet store to pick up fish food. "It crossed my mind that they may have gotten to the electrical plants," he said, and by "they" he meant al Qaeda, the bad guys. But quickly, the city moved to the next emotion, which was an odd mixture of annoyance and relief. This was not a return to Hell, just a miserable inconvenience -- and after Sept. 11, that struck most New Yorkers as a fairly manageable bump in the road. The city's emergency response was fast, strong and supple. Reported crime actually went down. Police, firefighters and Emergency Medical Services were kept busy with a record number of 911 calls: heatstroke, elevator rescues, candle fires and so forth. But the deaths were few and the injuries isolated. Far more people found the blackout a good excuse for a party -- from midnight barbecues in Brooklyn (quick, before the steaks spoil!) to free cake and melting ice cream outside an Upper West Side bistro. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a billionaire who climbed hot stairwells and showered in the dark just like everyone else, typified the calm, level reaction of the City That Can Handle It. New York, Bloomberg said, "is now a very different place, a city that has the resiliency to conquer adversity." The Scale of New York It's difficult to get the scale of New York. Too big. When the power went out, about 10,000 police officers hit the streets: a veritable army -- but less than a third of the total force. Firefighters responded to 800 reports of fire. When the power was restored, subway engineers cleared and reenergized more than 650 miles of track. When the lights went out at NewYork-Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the largest hospital complexes in the world, 14 people were on operating tables, according to hospital CEO Herbert Pardes -- including one undergoing brain surgery, a couple of others with their hearts exposed, and another with a doctor opening the carotid artery. "The emergency generators immediately took over," Pardes said, and every surgery was completed. Hospital doctors went on to deliver 20 babies during the blackout, including a set of triplets. "Unless you are close to the issue of emergency readiness, you wouldn't know the range of problems you must anticipate," said Pardes, who oversees more than 15,000 employees. "You have to hold over the staff that is already on duty, because you don't know how many people will make it in for the next shift. But where do you house them? Are you ready to feed them? You have your generators -- but do you have adequate fuel to keep them running?" The Sept. 11 attacks forced New York institutions to think through more of these issues and to communicate about them, Pardes said. Throughout the blackout, area hospitals exchanged information and stood ready to share burdens, he said. When Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn and Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan had generator problems, for example, NewYork-Presbyterian prepared to receive critical patients who might need to be transferred -- though, ultimately, no one had to be moved. Pardes said his hospital and others also rescued patients from nursing homes without generators. "Our people now know exactly what they're supposed to do in an emergency," Pardes said, "and they snap into it very quickly." More Fires, Less Crime All sorts of emergency workers snapped into it. Borough police commanders increased their staffing by up to 40 percent. Thousands of officers climbed into patrol cars and went rolling through the city with their lights flashing and their searchlights on. The last time New York lost electricity in a major way, in 1977, riots, looting and arson devastated whole neighborhoods. So many people were arrested they had to be processed at Yankee Stadium, and more than 50 police officers were injured. Not this time. Although a few stores were looted in Brooklyn and a McDonald's restaurant in Manhattan had its windows smashed, overall "there was virtually no crime," Bloomberg said. A Bronx shopkeeper named Ron Medina told the Daily News that "the police did a great job" protecting store owners whose electric security gates would not close without juice. "I saw a group of kids over by the Verizon store," Medina said, "and there were five cop cars on them before they could do anything." On a normal summer night, police make about 950 arrests, a spokesman said. On Dark Thursday, the number was 850 -- about 250 of them related to the blackout. Of course, the number could have been much higher if the police had chosen to enforce the law against drinking on the streets. In many parts of the city, people were having too much fun to riot. EMS crews answered more than 5,000 calls, a record -- twice the normal number, according to Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. Roughly 90,000 calls were logged to 911, three times the normal volume, but only the emergency telephone system itself failed to keep up, crashing repeatedly through the night. Rescue workers pried their way into 800 stalled elevator cars and stabilized hundreds of overheated, exhausted, thirsty citizens. "Very often, we were in pitch-black buildings," said Eugene Nicholas, a paramedic with Lenox Hill Hospital. Nicholas worked nearly 15 straight hours through Thursday night. The most common problem, he said, was that battery-powered oxygen pumps were running out of power all over town. 'The Brotherhood' Like so many others, Capt. Frank Poulin thought of terrorists. "It was the first thing that came to my mind," said the commander of New York Fire Department Company 217, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Tim Gibney, a firefighter at the station, had the same thought but tried not to let it show. "You try not to get excited," he said, "because if people see us excited, they get excited." Bloomberg's demeanor at his initial press conference on Thursday settled their nerves, and they buckled down for a long night of firefighting. "It was insane," Poulin said. Apartments throughout the neighborhood caught fire as residents set out candles for light -- then knocked them over or forgot about them. When daylight came, the firefighters helped elderly residents of a nearby housing project up the stairs only to discover that the power outage had cut the water supply to many apartments. So the firefighters opened hydrants for residents to cool off and fill pitchers. Then the power came back on. "The whole neighborhood applauded," Poulin said. Company 217 sat down to lunch -- and another rash of alarms erupted. Apparently, the surge of power had sparked more fires. The captain ordered all the hydrants shut so that there would be enough pressure to fight the new fires. This, he figures, didn't make him any friends among the neighborhood kids. But who knows? Gabriel McQueen, 26, used to be one of those kids. He was born the year Bed-Stuy rioted during the last major New York blackout, and he grew up two blocks from Poulin's firehouse. "I used to come by the station after school and see the pole and wonder how it slides," McQueen said today. "Now I get to do it." McQueen joined the department in the aftermath of Sept. 11, hoping to become what is now known, in limp bureaucratese, as a "first responder." That's not the way he would put it, of course. His phrase has more descriptive power -- he wanted to be "part of a society that calms people down in hard times." And he wanted to be part of "the brotherhood." That brotherhood is memorialized inside the station. Four crisp black-and-yellow uniforms hang in a space behind the truck, for the four men from this house who died on Sept. 11. One was Philip T. Hayes, a 20-year veteran of 217 who had retired from the department and gone to work as a safety specialist at the World Trade Center. Before he died, Hayes saved a group of children at a nursery school in one of the towers. There wasn't much time, so he coaxed the kids into a shopping cart. He told them it was a game. Engine 7, Ladder 1 Steven Olsen lives on Long Island and works at Engine 7, Ladder 1 -- one of the most famous firehouses in the city. A pair of French filmmakers happened to be shooting a documentary about the life of a rookie firefighter at Olsen's station on the day the World Trade Center was hit. Now, almost two years later, signs of that day are few: Five flags hang from the back of the firehouse -- gifts from admirers around the world. In the firehouse restroom, there's a drawing of a firefighter strangling Osama bin Laden. After a long, hot day of rescues and apartment fires, Olsen sat in a tiny air-conditioned receiving room at the station house, listening with one ear to a reporter's questions and with the other to a squawking radio scanner. His mind ranged from his morning in Hell to the evening the lights went out -- and onward toward plans for the firehouse supper of roast beef and potato salad. Olsen made three separate trips into the North Tower to rescue survivors, and as he emerged the last time he felt something so strange it was difficult to comprehend. "I told Joe" -- the firefighter next to him -- "that the building was shivering and shaking, and no faster did I say that than the building was coming down." He spent 15 or 20 minutes under the debris. "That was the end. I thought I was dead." The lesson he took from that day, and from nine long months spent digging in the wreckage for dead comrades, was that life is short and must be savored. "I don't work as hard anymore," Olsen said on Friday, the day he carried a woman in a wheelchair down nine flights of stairs. "And I try to go on a lot more vacations with my family." So, before he answered another crisis this past week, Olsen calmed his wife and children. He set up generators for power, got a neighborhood block party organized, rustled up a slumber party for the girls in the cool basement of his Patchogue home. Then he set off for Manhattan at 2 a.m. Friday. "The whole day's a blur," he said many hours later. "We've just been going, going, going." Busy, hot, sweaty, leg-weary and lung-fatigued. But it was not a bad day, not bad at all, for a man, and a city, that have seen so much worse. Staff writers Colum Lynch and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report. |
New Yorkers View Perishables in a New Light Power is back on, but residents have issues about food and spoilage. Dare they nosh on that brie or order the fish when while dining out? Photos No Dairy (Jennifer S. Altman / Special to the Times) August 16, 2003 Spoiled milk products (Jennifer S. Altman / Special to the Times) August 16, 2003 Story Gallery Blackout Coverage Times Headlines Pentagon Reform Is His Battle Cry Chiropractic Claims Pain California Employers Collared by a Clue in the Chicken Coop Ohio Remains Focus of Blackout Inquiry This Slot Master Is No Two-Bit Cheat more > NEW YORK CITY BLACKOUT By Valerie Reitman, Walter Hamilton and John Goldman, Times Staff Writers NEW YORK -- A city that relishes its restaurants and delis was in a "hold the mayo" frame of mind Saturday. The power was back on, but New Yorkers viewed deli cases and menus with jaundiced eyes. "Oh yeah, now it's cold," said one dubious man as he prowled Morgan's market in Manhattan eyeing the same milk, cheese, yogurt and very limp Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream that had been there during the blackout. "I'm not eating anything fresh from here for another week. The milk's a little chunky." The concern about food safety and the assurances from city and state leaders that they will increase inspections marked the city's return to near normalcy Saturday after the lights went out shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday. With trapped suburbanites finally able to make their way home Friday night, New Yorkers reveled in having the city to themselves and bonded in a collective sense of having overcome another crisis this one with few casualties. And they drifted back to more mundane activities, like cleaning out their refrigerators and deciding whether it was safe to eat the brie or order the fish at dinner. "If this had happened before Sept. 11 without the bigger sense of needing to stay calm and working together, it would have been so different," said Andrew Karle as he dined with a companion at the Luca Lounge in Lower Manhattan. The entire city was without power for at least 12 hours, but some neighborhoods stayed dark for nearly 30 hours. Sanitation trucks worked overtime Friday and Saturday, picking up the piles of discarded food from city streets. Many though far from all stores and restaurants reopened Saturday. Subways and trains ran normal weekend schedules, and for once, jaded New Yorkers gave thanks for things they often gripe about, like the subway. "I can jump for joy," said Tammie Smith, 32, a juvenile justice worker as she stepped out of the 33rd Street subway station en route from her Brooklyn home. "No more $45 cabs." Maureen Moran smiled as she entered the subway Saturday afternoon. It had taken the attorney four hours Thursday night to walk from her Midtown Manhattan office to her home in Brooklyn. "You never appreciate [the subway] until it goes down," she said. It was a refrain heard frequently. Still, some New Yorkers took nothing for granted. John Thompson, a 42-year-old promotions manager from the Bronx, went to the office for a few hours Saturday. He rode the subway, but took his bike along after walking a long way home Thursday night. "This was my backup option just in case," Thompson said. Ray Venezia, a sales manager at a sporting-goods store, was one of the last people in the city to get his electricity back. Like others, he grumbled about the seemingly random order in which power came back to various neighborhoods, with his Chelsea neighborhood among the last, getting power restored 29 hours after it went out. Elsewhere,workers scrambled to put the finishing touches on the recovery. Ernesto Perez, a technician for an air-conditioning repair company, began work about 7 a.m. and figured he'd be lucky to finish by 10 p.m. before doing it all over again today. Thermostats in many businesses had to be reset for the air conditioning to function, he said. The New York airports were one of the last remnants of the city still suffering the after-effects of the blackout. LaGuardia and JFK airports each canceled about 600 flights, said Dan Maynard, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airports. Some additional flights were canceled on Saturday, and those that took off were delayed an average of 30 to 45 minutes mostly because of bad weather elsewhere, he said. The situation was better at LaGuardia than JFK, Maynard said. Many people who had been forced to sleep at LaGuardia on Thursday and Friday were finally able to fly out, he said. At JFK, a backlog of passengers waited to get going. Many beaches were closed because of suspected contamination from sewage. Government officials stopped short of assuring New Yorkers that there would be no further electrical problems. Gov. George Pataki urged people to remain cautious in their energy use especially on Monday when millions of riders crowd subways for the morning and evening rush hours. Meanwhile, both Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have promised that health inspectors will be making rounds at stores and restaurants to check that all the perishable merchandise has been discarded. Many restaurants and markets tossed out thousands of dollars' worth of meat, dairy products and produce. At the Food Emporium in Lower Manhattan Saturday morning, workers were hosing down the deli meat counter and hauling all the spoiled milk and beef away. "The only milk that's good is at the end of the row," a worker called out to customers, assuring them it had just been delivered. Workers directed customers to a eggs and milk they said had just been delivered. Citarella, which has five gourmet groceries, assured skeptical customers who called that it had loaded all its meat and dairy products onto refrigerated trucks during the crisis. Still, some customers were dubious. One man said the clerk tried to reassure him that the manchego cheese was still fresh by peeling off a slice and eating it. At a D'Agostino supermarket on Manhattan's Upper East Side, customers were warned not to buy from a huge freezer containing piles of cheeses. A handwritten sign warned the food was spoiled. Manel Ruiz, who was having brunch in Edward's Restaurant in Lower Manhattan, said he won't go shopping for perishable food in New York for the next two days. And he's not eating any meat in restaurants though he viewed the eggs Benedict he ordered as likely to be safe. He's dropping any notion of eating sushi, he said. As for taxi driver Caros Razuri, he's planning to stay out of the supermarkets for the next week. He said he stopped by one store in Queens and it smelled wrong. "I'm sure they'll still try to sell the bad stuff," he said. On Saturday, he went to a deli to buy a ham sandwich, but reconsidered and bought lentil soup instead. Said Razuri, "They're going to have to have a lot of Imodium handy in the next few days." |
LA Times Complete coverage of the power outage that hit the East. Ohio Remains Focus of Blackout Inquiry By Richard A. Serrano and Nancy Rivera Brooks Investigators still in the dark as to why three line failures sparked such a widespread shutdown. August 17, 2003 New Yorkers View Perishables in a New Light By Valerie Reitman, Walter Hamilton and John Goldman Power is back on, but residents have issues about food and spoilage. Dare they nosh on that brie or order the fish when while dining out? August 17, 2003 Detroit Handles Blackout Smoothly, Revs Up Again By Reed Johnson The city is proud and relieved that two nights in the dark didn't result in civil disturbances or looting. Most of the region's power is back. August 17, 2003 Midwest 'Electricity Highway' Might Be Source of Blackout By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Richard T. Cooper and Nick Anderson A segment of the grid in Ohio had problems shortly before the outage. Power is being restored but several problems remain. August 16, 2003 At Last, New York Gets Pulse Back By Elizabeth Jensen, Valerie Reitman and John J. Goldman A sense of adventure dominates, with electricity returning in fits and starts. August 16, 2003 Detroit Lags in Midwests Reboot By Reed Johnson and Eric Slater More than 1 million homes lack power as much of the region blinks back on. August 16, 2003 President Calls for Upgrade of Power System By Nick Anderson and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar The multi-state blackout could be the catalyst that breaks a congressional logjam on energy policy. Bills have languished for more than two years. August 16, 2003 BLACKOUT: THE RECOVERY Complex Electric System Links Power and Disaster By Nancy Rivera Brooks Occasionally, the grid becomes a widespread problem as safeguards kick in and shut down overloaded lines and plants to prevent fires. August 16, 2003 Lost Revenues Soar for Businesses Affected by the Massive Outage By James F. Peltz Losses for U.S. businesses soared Friday as they struggled to recover from a massive power outage in the Northeast and upper Midwest. August 16, 2003 Countries Finger-Pointing on Blackout By Bob Baker and Andrew VanVelzen It's one more thing for the U.S. and Canada to disagree about: Where did the outage start? August 16, 2003 Massive Blackout Hits the East By John J. Goldman and Walter Hamilton Outage is felt from New York to Ottawa to Detroit. Terrorism is ruled out as a cause. August 15, 2003 Outdated Power Grid's Failure Not a Surprise By Nancy Rivera Brooks and Nancy Vogel The cascading power outages in the Northeast on Thursday underscore what energy experts have been warning about for years: The system can go down anywhere at any time. August 15, 2003 Hours of Bedlam In a New York Minute By Valerie Reitman, Elizabeth Jensen and Stephen Braun NEW YORK In an instant, Manhattan plunged back in time. Powerless, New Yorkers emerged into a heat-choked city where even the usual tumult of an afternoon commute was strained to the breaking point. As night fell and the city eased, waiting for the lights to return, the silhouettes of darkened skyscrapers loomed like distant hills over Central Park. August 15, 2003 MASSIVE BLACKOUT '65 Was Cool but '77 Was Boiling By Eric Malnic The first time the lights went out all over New York was Nov. 9, 1965, when the failure of a single relay switch in Ontario, Canada, triggered a sequence of power system overloads that shut down a regional grid, blacking out virtually the entire Northeast within 15 minutes. August 15, 2003 MASSIVE BLACKOUT Business for Banks, Phone Firms Slows By James F. Peltz Transportation concerns also hit hard. Financial markets avoid trouble. An economist says 'the timing is relatively good.' August 15, 2003 MASSIVE BLACKOUT How New Federal Agency Handled News of Outage By Mark Fineman And Vicki Kemper A Homeland Security crisis unit took 45 minutes to analyze the blackout for signs of a terrorist attack. August 15, 2003 |
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Right now my whole system is mad at me for not taking better care of myself this weekend. I am paying for it now. |
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I feel like shit today. |
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Asshole burnage. |
even white boys gotta shout. |