Historical Moments In Radio
October 1996

Northeast Power Blackout

	Historical Moments in Radio .. stories of the rich and exciting
past on the a.m. radio dial .. and today I want to relate the story of
the great Northeast Blackout and how it was handled by radio stations. 
Now, to set the scene, I was living in Princeton, New Jersey in November,
1965 and, that evening coming out from work, I started my car out in the
parking lot about 5 fifteen or so .. the radio was still set to WOR from
my drive into work that morning .. I always listened to John Gambling in
the morning .. and I thought nothing of it until they switched to their
helicopter out over the scene of the crash out at the airport.  I
remember thinking two things .. particularly since I was in a job that
required lots of air travel at that time .. how would I handle this with
Linda when I got home .. you see, she always pointed out that trouble
like air crashes happen in sets of three .. and just yesterday there had
been a fatal airliner crash in Cincinnati.  The other thing I remember
was reaching over to fine tune the radio since the helicopter report
sounded a bit scratchy.
	It wasn’t until the helicopter reported was finishing that I
realized he had "sent it back to the WLW studios".
	Now, wait a minute.  There is no way one can receive WLW in
Princeton, New Jersey considering that, at the time, we were in a major
lobe of WOR only 30 miles away.  Huh, WOR must be off the air!  So I
reset the dial to 710 as best I could estimate it .. and drove home.  It
wasn’t until I got into the house and had been listening to the radio for
many minutes there that the WOR carrier came on .. and, moments later,
the tentative words of the announcer checking to hear if he was on the
air .. there were two of them in the studio .. operating with remote
audio equipment that used batteries and connected to the New Jersey
transmitter site by regular telephone lines.  And the story began to
unfold.  New York City was totally dark by now .. except for the
brilliantly lighted ships lining the Hudson River docks the full length
of Manhattan Island.  Power was off, they estimated, all over the city
and even in parts of New Jersey.  Everything they reported for the first
quarter hour was live and was about what they could see from their
building at 1440 Broadway, just down from Times Square.  It wasn’t too
much since they were surrounded by skyscrapers.
	Slowly, the telephones came on and they found a way to connect
them into their makeshift audio equipment and then the enormity of the
problem began to emerge.  They had calls from all over New York State and
then from New England.  Well, as we now know, the entire Northeast Power
Grid went down because of an overload that triggered circuit breakers at
every power generating station in the region.  A year later it was
determined that it all started when a circuit breaker at the Sir Adam
Beck Power Station in Niagara Falls, Ontario had failed .. and then, like
dominos, the whole system went dark.
	Years later, I took my family to the Sir Adam Beck station and
found they gave guided tours of that immaculate plant.  During the tour I
asked the neatly uniformed lass who was giving the lecture if this was
where the Northeast Power Blackout started.  She paused .. looked me in
the eye with the nicest smile and said "oh, yes sir .. we were the first
power station affected by that breakdown."
	But while I’ve talked only about WOR, you should understand that
EVERY station in the great Northeast was affected by the blackout.  The
Power Grid came down into New Jersey to a point just 14 miles north of
Princeton .. so we had no inkling of it.
The reports of how other stations dealt with the mess showed varying
degrees of difficulty.  WCBS in New York was a star player;  they had
installed diesel generators at the studios that switched on immediately. 
And out at High Island in Long Island Sound, they had a huge generator
that could run their 10 kilowatt backup transmitter and, within minutes,
WCBS was in full stride.  The funniest problem WCBS had was with their
mobile van studios.  Both vans were parked in the building’s inside
garage .. the one with electric doors?  WNEW didn’t lose their
transmitter power but was only able to play records from their New Jersey
transmitter site since there were no microphones out there .. their link
from the studio was re-established within minutes, however.
	The spanish voice of New York, WHOM at 1480 on the dial, remained
on all evening using up their batteries .. but they just lasted until
normal signoff at 1 a.m.  And the radio station of the New York Times? 
For the first time in 25 years, they were off the air.  
	Power was returned in some parts of the city later that evening
but, of course, not all the city could be switched on at once since an
impossibly heavy starting load would have been placed on the system.  By
the next morning, though, things were pretty much back to normal.
	And the rest is history.  This is John Bowker.