Northeast Blackout

[W6TOM]

 50 years ago Monday was the great Northeastern Blackout, Ontario, New York State and New England, I'm surprised no one remembered.

 I was a Sophomore in high school and had just  come home after picking my father up from his car pool out of Boston, about 5:30. We were beginning to eat dinner when the lights went on and off a few times and then out. We lite some candles and went back to dinner, my father turned on a battery powered radio, it was tuned to WBZ, a 50 KW AM station in Boston.

 NO WBZ, or any other radio stations !! A few minutes later WBZ was back but real weak, they announced they were on emergency generator, 5 KW and the Governor of MA had declared a state of emergency.

 We got our power back around 8 that night.

[Pete, WA2CWA]

The blackout affected parts of Ontario in Canada and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. I was on 40 meter phone at the time participating in a net. Stations started disappearing and 40 meters became very quiet. I lived in central Jersey at the time; we never lost power.

[WB2EMS]

I was in a Rochester NY suburb (Webster) down in my basement shack fiddling with something when the lights went out. My mom instantly appeared at the top of the stairs demanding to know what I had done to black out the whole block!     Took a while to convince her that it wasn't me. We lit some candles and started a fire in the fireplace and had some warmed soup. I brought out my little transistor radio and we listened to the news and learned how widespread it was.

Must have made an impression. I have a woodstove and a pile of flashlights and batteries and some nice battery powered radios these days. 

[WA2TTP Steve]

I was at technical school in lower Manhattan and ended up walking about 9 miles with 3 friends to Astoria Queens where one of the guys lived. His mother made us dinner on the gas stove and then he drove us to our homes out on Long Island. Power was out about 24 hours.

Steve

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I was at technical school in lower Manhattan and ended up walking about 9 miles with 3 friends to Astoria Queens where one of the guys lived. His mother made us dinner on the gas stove and then he drove us to our homes out on Long Island. Power was out about 24 hours.

Steve

RCA?

[WA2TTP Steve]

Yes. 65 to Jan 68

[w1vtp]

We had a brownout in Manchester NH that's all.  Pete, I wish I had been on the air that night.  That would have quite eerie

Al

[KA2DZT]

I was at technical school in lower Manhattan and ended up walking about 9 miles with 3 friends to Astoria Queens where one of the guys lived. His mother made us dinner on the gas stove and then he drove us to our homes out on Long Island. Power was out about 24 hours.

Steve

I thought I was the only one at RCA.  Just got off the elevator and the lights blinked a bit.  Walk the one block to the 14th street subway, went down the steps from the street level and the lights went out.  Came back up and walk the 25 or so blocks to the 40th street bus station.  Got on the bus home to NJ.  Never forget looking back across the river to see the City in complete darkness except for car lights.

Fred

[Pete, WA2CWA]

I was there, but that semester I had the morning time so was home by early afternoon and playing radio. During that time, I was running my Apache/SB-10 combo with a Hammarlund HQ-170A-VHF. At first I thought the receiver was starting to fail as signals disappeared.

Walking to the 14th subway passed the "Red Rose". Some coins spent there discussing and doing homework.

[WA2TTP Steve]

Pete,

You lucked out with the morning class schedule. I used to frequent the "Red Rose" with my friends, didn't even think of that place until your post.

Fred,

I was a few minutes behind you so the lights were completely out and when we got to the 14 th st subway entrance it looked like a black hole. We walked to Penn station and had a beer, somewhat warm, and hatched the plan to walk to Astoria. I tried to call my parents from Penn but the pay phones were totally over-loaded and didn't have dial tone. When I picked up the handset you could hear multiple conversations, kind of like a party line.

Steve

[AJ1G]

I was in 8th grade and about a year shy of getting my novice license but had been SWLing with my Scott SLRM and fooling around with BC receivers and such.  I was working on an audio amplifier with a pair of big old school glass envelope push pull 6L6s.  It was a pull from a junker console receiver that had the audio stages on a separate chassis.  It was working well and I shut off the lights in the basement to better see the blue glow in the 6L6 envelopes.  Suddenly the amp output quit, the filaments slowly faded out from bright orange to dull red and then total blackness, followed by my mother yelling to me from upstairs "Chris, what did you do down there, the power went out up here!" I answered the requisite "Nothin Ma!", but my initial thought was that the amplifier power supply had faulted and somehow taken the power with it.  We then realized the whole neighborhood was out and eventually heard about the full extent if the outage on a battery powered AM-FM-SW portable I had.

Can also recall where I was during the 1977 black out and the third big one maybe 15 years ago.  The latter one hit just after our company shuttle plane had taken off from Dulles.  First indication I had of a problem was noticing all the traffic lights in Groton were out while driving home after we landed.  If our pilot was aware of the blackout en route he didn't tell us about it.

[W6WAC]

I remember a little of that night, walking around the house with candles.  And that very night, my younger brother was born at Brookhaven Memorial out on Long Island

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Pete,

You lucked out with the morning class schedule. I used to frequent the "Red Rose" with my friends, didn't even think of that place until your post.

Steve

Nothing better then a early morning fire drill and a quick run over to the Red Rose for a 15 cent glass of beer to perk up the brain waves.

[Steve - K4HX]

I often hear people on the radio saying that they are blackout.

[WA2TTP Steve]

Here are some pictures of the blackout story in Life Magazine. The pictures are hi resolution so you can zoom in and read it.


Steve

[WA2TTP Steve]

More pictures

[WA2ROC]

Here's WABC's Dan Ingram as the power slowly faded away:

http://www.yourememberthat.com/media/10862/WABC_RADIO_-_Dan_Ingram_-_1965_East_Coast_Blackout/#.VkXNX0b9zic

[n2bc]

I was a newbie with IBM's Buffalo Branch Office when the blackout hit.    About a year later I was tasked with installing a specially built box at the Robert Moses power plant located on the Niagara River across the gorge from where the blackout started.

The box collected data from the Moses station and sent it off to the Power Authority of NY (PASNY).  The idea was to centralize status info for the 8 state operated generating stations.

The best part of working on the Moses project was getting to know the Moses Station's Chief Engineer.  He recounted the night of the blackout.....   He was sitting at his dining room table which looked out upon the Moses switchyard.  He had never seen it completely dark!

If you read the descriptions of the 'why' behind the blackout, you will notice that the generating stations couldn't get back online without power!   Moses had the same problem.   One other change to Moses was the addition of pneumatic penstock gate operators for two of the 13 generators.  Then they could 'blow' open the control gate for at least one generator and generate power to start the rest.

Robert Moses was a fun place to work.  The 'cook's tours' of the station were amazing.  Standing under the rotor of a working generator is life long memory.

Check your flashlights once in a while!  Got gas for the generator? 

73, Bill  N2BC

[W4EWH]

I lived in Derry, New Hampshire at the time, and we had suffered from so many outages that when the lights started dimming and blooming, my brother and I both rushed for the Kerosene lamps and were ready to light them, and then ...

... nothing happened. We still had power, and we were amazed at the TV reports: I remember David Brinkly, reporting from New York, talking about how they were using a portable camera intended for reporting from the floor of a political convention, and that the lights in the studio looked like they should have been hung up next to a tent for scaling fish.

My dad called up the president of the New Hampshire power authority to congratulate him. His call had a good result: when he told the man that our power failed about once a week, the Power Authority posted a $500 reward for the kids who were fooling with the power line shutoffs, and the outages stopped.

Those whom are curious about another power-outage I experienced should read my post on rec.radio.amateur.moderated - (Scroll up to the top of the page) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/group$3Arec.radio.amateur.moderated$20%22Scotty$2C$20I$20need$20more$20power%22%7Csort:date/rec.radio.amateur.moderated/Gs3wr8WgV6Q/HKMr0zF-SesJ.

[flintstone mop]

Caused by human error in setting a trip current level from a generating plant at Niagara. Cold night and heavy electrical overload and one plant goes down and the domino effect.
They got the grid to be very reliable the last 15 yrs and it seems pretty resilient.
Now we worry about cyber attack of the grid and the ability to destroy it and 2 yrs without electricity.

[K9DXL]

Listening to the Don Ingram clip with the turntables slowing down... maybe the line frequency was changing along with the voltage drop.  I bet the power transformers at the transmitter were groaning in pain.  I was in my fraternity house at Miami University in Ohio.  A lot of us listened to WABC at night, clear as a bell.  When we heard about the blackout, a lot of people tried to call their folks out east.  Everybody wondered what the hell was going on.

BTW, loved the old "77-ABC" jingle and the ABC news sounder.  And wow, what long commercials!

[W6TOM]

  In 2011 human error caused a 500 KV transmission circuit to trip near Yuma, AZ, that circuit fed another 500 KV transmissin circuit that fed San Diego. The lights went out in San Diego County, Orange County and Baja (Mexico).

[flintstone mop]

Listening to the Don Ingram clip with the turntables slowing down... maybe the line frequency was changing along with the voltage drop.  I bet the power transformers at the transmitter were groaning in pain.  I was in my fraternity house at Miami University in Ohio.  A lot of us listened to WABC at night, clear as a bell.  When we heard about the blackout, a lot of people tried to call their folks out east.  Everybody wondered what the hell was going on.

BTW, loved the old "77-ABC" jingle and the ABC news sounder.  And wow, what long commercials!

Good post! I heard that clip too and a little playback of the slowed down music. It must have been a helluva of drop in freq. Pole pigs and the huge transformers involved in the PS of the old monster plate modulated transmitters were probably really heating up.
A very strange and unusual situation.
They got that 60hz thing locked on these days

Fred

[KD6VXI]

I'll agree on the frequency being locked and rock solid.

The grid tied solar and wind systems I do have a leeway from 59.4 to 60.6. 

The micro inverter Setups also line monitor for > 5 minutes before they sync to phase.....   Purportedly to ensure the frequency is stable they sync to.

--Shane
KD6VXI

[flintstone mop]

Here's youtube audio clip of the Dan Ingram show and the slow tunes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djqVA6ZL7Ro

I'm sure that the slower playback was screwing up the timing of the station to play spots and ABC news.

Fred