Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” hits movie theaters this Friday. It’s set in the tense Big Apple of 1977, when David Berkowitz cruised the streets looking for women in parked cars on whom he trained his .44-caliber revolver.
The “Son of Sam” killer’s reign of terrorand capture, recounted here Sunday and yesterday, wasn’t the only big story during that summer, whose headlines included death raining down from the Pan Am Building and Elvis Presley’s demise in Memphis. Today, we relive that fateful summer’s big blackout.
It was the day the nation’s most powerful city lost its power.
On July 13, 1977, lightning struck two high-voltage power lines just north of the city on a steamy summer night. And within an hour, Mother Nature and human nature conspired to cut off more than 8 million Con Ed customers, some for as long as 25 hours.
The Great Blackout of ’77 also set off one of the largest looting binges in history.
Throughout the first terrible night, and the long day that followed, clergymen rode around in police cars, using bullhorns to talk people out of an arson-and-theft spree that cut a wide swath through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx.
More than 3,400 people were hauled away for looting and vandalism, with damages and loss estimated at about $135 million. Officials estimated workers lost about $5 million in wages. The numbers might seem trivial in 1990s dollars, but there was no denying that both the human and financial cost of the disaster was inestimable.
Firemen responded to 2,225 alarms involving 851 fires during the blackout, with more than half of the blazes considered serious. Thirty-eight firefighters were injured; three civilians died. More than 550 cops were injured keeping a fragile peace.
“We are without God now,” one priest told worshippers at St. Barbara’s Roman Catholic Church in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
But it was a time New Yorkers proved their resilience and honor as well.
Pedestrians rushed bravely into chaotic intersections and began to direct traffic – some snazzily dressed for a posh evening on the town. People with flashlights led those without up dark stairwells in buildings where elevators were kaput.
At an apartment building at 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, the manager and his staff knocked on every apartment door to see if anyone needed oxygen, buoying spirits for those plunged into darkness and living alone.
A lone bagpiper suddenly appeared under the big clock at Grand Central Terminal, eerily stuck at 9:35 p.m.
At Shea Stadium, with the Cubs winning 2-1 in the sixth inning, Met manager Joe Torre – the same man who now helms the Yankees – leaned next to the dugout and gazed up into the dark stands, where a crowd of 22,000 sang “White Christmas” along with Jane Jarvis at the organ.
He later told reporters he wasn’t so sorry to see the game put off since, his two best left-handed hitters, John Milner and Ed Kranepool, were sidelined with muscle pulls.
At busy Bellevue Hospital, doctors and nurses had to squeeze bags of air with their hands to resuscitate patients in respiratory failure after the city hospital’s emergency backup power supply failed.
Typically, city residents romanticized – or fictionalized – their parts in the grand disaster.
“I was in Roseland, and the orchestra played ‘Dancing in the Dark’ all night,” Post columnist Earl Wilson reported one man saying.
For weeks, the papers sizzled with stories of “Mr. Blackout,” William Jurith, a 29-year Con Ed vet who was on duty at the energy-control center at West End Avenue and 65th Street when nature and man conspired to plunge the nation’s greatest city into darkness.
Excerpts from tapes released a month after the disaster showed how Con Ed and New York Power Pool workers conferred in increasingly worried exchanges.
The tapes proved that for at least a few minutes during the crisis, Jurith thought, in error, that he could still use a feeder line through Westchester County. For his part, a New York Power Pool dispatcher in upstate Guilderland thought – again, in error – that a tie between the Long Island Lighting Co. and Con Ed had been interrupted.
“The pool operator and the Con Ed system operator were talking to each other, but they weren’t communicating,” said Con Ed’s then-president, Arthur Hauspurg.
The tapes showed the Con Ed operator time and again acknowledging directions, but not acting on them:
8:56 p.m.
*Pool: “Bill, you’d better shed some load until you get down below this thing …”
*Con Ed: “Yeah.”
*Pool: “So, you’d better do something to get rid of that until you get yourself straightened out.”
*Con Ed: “I’m trying. I’m trying.”
8:59 p.m.
*Pool: “Bill, I hate to bother you, but you’d better shed about 400 MW [megawatts] of load or you’re going to lose everything down there.”
*Con Ed: “I’m trying to.”
*Pool: “You’re trying to – all you have to do is hit the button to shed it and then we’ll worry about it afterward …”
*Con Ed: “Yeah, right. Yeah, fine.”
9:27 p.m.
*Pool: “OK, I’m going to tell you one more time. If you don’t shed about 600 MW of load immediately …”
*Con Ed power dispatcher: “He’s doing it as fast as he can, pal …”
*Pool: “All you got to do is punch a button to get rid of it.”
*Con Ed: “That’s what he’s doing [expletive] right now.”
*Pool: “Shed 600 MW immediately or … you’re out of business.”
*Con Ed: “I know that.”