Niagara: A History of the Falls (51 page)

He paid a fine of $113 for breaking the law and dropped out of the public eye. He returned to Niagara Falls on the tenth anniversary of his plunge to visit with the family and friends of Jean Lussier, who had died the previous year. Again, he was asked to reveal why he’d gone over the Falls, and again he evaded the question. “I’d rather not go into that,” he said with a smile.

At that point, he was studying behavioural science and sociology at New York University, having taken a leave of absence from IBM’s department of equal opportunity. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1977 and continued his studies on a post-doctoral fellowship. Then he joined the National Institute on Drug Abuse as researcher and speech writer.

He was in no sense a typical Falls daredevil. Yet in 1988 he announced he would again go over in a barrel, not for money or personal gain, but to throw the spotlight of publicity on the U.S. government’s treatment of minorities and women. “I hurt in every part of my mind, heart and body,” Fitzgerald told a press conference. “There is no hurt like a crushing sense of injustice. It is unbearable and debilitating. It becomes the most controlling force in your life.” He claimed a white superior would not allow him, a black man, to be given credit for some sociological research he had done on blood pressure. “My losses have been truly staggering. I have lost my dream, my health, and even may have lost my chance to relieve the suffering of humanity.… I intend to make a second plunge over the Falls to protest the U.S. Government’s treatment … of whistle blowers who ethically resist corruption.”

He never did it. “I’m trying to talk him out of it,” his wife said, “but he’s a very determined person.” Apparently she succeeded, for Dr. William Fitzgerald, a.k.a. Nathan Boya, the diffident daredevil – like Annie Taylor and Jean Lussier before him – never made good on his promise to tempt the cataract a second time. Nor has he ever explained his reasons for doing it at all.

2
Blackout

Four years after William Fitzgerald’s plunge, eighty thousand square miles of northeastern North America were suddenly blacked out by the worst power failure in the continent’s history. The trouble was traced to a small fail-safe device, no larger than a pay telephone, in the Sir Adam Beck Generating Plant No. 2 at Niagara Falls. At eleven seconds after 5:16 p.m. on November 9, 1965, at the worst possible hour, when most people were heading home from work and housewives were cooking dinner on their electric stoves, the device automatically triggered the catastrophe.

Exactly thirty seconds later, in the Robert Moses generating station across the river, operators sensed trouble. The familiar hum of the big generators became a series of eerie, off-key whines as they suddenly changed pitch. Synchronized to produce power at 120 revolutions a minute, they now began to spin at varying speeds. The dials that showed the amount of power the plant was producing went wild. The automatic governors that set the speed of the generators sprang into action, but these were soon fighting each other – one slowing down to compensate for the loss in demand for power, another speeding up as its automatic equipment sensed an increasing demand for its own power production. The needle that indicated the flow of power came right off the paper, producing “more squiggly lines than in an earthquake.” The power zoomed suddenly from 1,500 megavolts to 2,250, then dropped back to zero.

Herbert Hubbard, the chief project operator, took three men with him and raced downstairs to begin manual operation of the generators, resynchronizing them by hand individually and bringing them back to proper speed. By 5:45 they were operating normally, but at 6:30 they went out of step once more. Again, it took manual operation to calm them down.

By then the entire northeast power grid was in disarray. In just twelve minutes, thirty million bewildered people in eight states were plunged into blackness; most of Ontario was also affected. Dale Chapman, a United Airlines pilot, was flying at 30,000 feet and looked down at the bright lights of New York City; suddenly he found that the entire city was missing. To him, it looked like the end of the world. Another pilot, Reinhard Noethel, flying a Boeing 707 at 39,000 feet, told his passengers that if they looked out of the windows on the left side they’d see Boston – and then gasped: Boston was gone.

In Niagara Falls, where it all started, power was restored by seven that evening, partly because of the large number of producing stations in the area and partly because of prompt action by the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, which quickly cut back power to its industrial customers.

Toronto, with its 670 electric streetcars and 130 electric trolley buses, blacked out for an hour and twenty minutes at the height of the rush hour. Nineteen minutes later, at 6:54 p.m., it blacked out again. Power was restored at 7:12, but a third outage came at 7:22. Surface lines did not begin running again until 8:32. The subways – with 12,000 passengers aboard – were out until nine o’clock. The result was chaos. Traffic lights stopped working, and in the words of one witness, “the pedestrians went wild, like cattle let out of a pen.” At least two men left stalled streetcars to act as emergency traffic policemen. Apartment dwellers couldn’t get their cars into garages that operated with electric doors; others couldn’t use elevators or even some stairs because these were intended as fire escapes and were reached by doors opened only from the inside.

But Toronto’s problems paled beside those of New York City, which was out of power for almost fourteen hours, partly because Consolidated Edison did not move quickly enough to cut itself off from the interconnected systems. The blackout began at 5:27 p.m. Service was not restored until dawn.

Ten thousand of New York’s subway passengers were trapped for seven hours; 800,000 were stranded in electric commuter trains. Two trains ground to a stop in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge, suspended high above the East River. Mary Doyle, an eighteen-year-old commuter, would always remember the sensation, rather like riding on a Ferris wheel: “The wind would blow and the train would sway and some people would scream.” With the help of the police, she and the others made their way gingerly across an eleven-inch catwalk leading from the tracks to the bridge’s roadway below. This precarious manoeuvre occupied five hours.

Firemen were forced to break through walls in the three tallest skyscrapers – the Empire State, Pan American, and RCA buildings – to release scores of people trapped in elevators. Thirteen strangers squeezed into an elevator on the twenty-first floor of the Empire State Building grew to know each other so well that they organized a Blackout Club that met regularly long after the incident was over. Stranded on the thirty-second floor of another building, a lawyer turned and said to his fellow passengers, “Thank God we’ve got some whiskey.” When the whiskey was gone, they held seances to understand their spiritual selves. Four people found themselves trapped for twenty hours in the RCA Building. One turned out to be a yoga expert. To fight off boredom, he gave the others lessons in various positions, even demonstrating by standing on his head.

Five hundred aircraft had to be diverted from New York City. One thousand overseas passengers found their transatlantic flights cancelled. Some three million cheques could not be cleared at the Federal Reserve Bank. Television went off the air and only transistor and car radios worked. The
New York Times
was the only paper able to publish, thanks to a printing plant across the Hudson in that part of New Jersey unaffected by the power failure.

Yet people groping their way along the dark streets or stranded in the bars and cafés, sleeping on couches and carpets in hotels, remained remarkably cheerful. Fifteen people sang Calypso songs aboard one stranded train and danced in the aisles. Crime, astonishingly, took a holiday. Civil defence was alerted and the National Guard called out, yet there were only a quarter of the arrests made on a normal night. Only two people died as a result of the power failure, one from a heart attack after climbing ten flights of stairs, the other from a fall in the dark. One family’s apartment was gutted by a fire caused by emergency candles.

People who had taken the genie of electricity for granted all their lives now came to realize they had become its slaves. The experience of the family of Edwin Robins, a mechanical engineer in Queens, was typical of that of thousands of gadget lovers who suddenly found that
nothing
worked. In the Robins house it wasn’t only the lights that went off. The heat went off because the oil furnace was triggered by electricity. The refrigerator stopped running. The stove wouldn’t work. The house was a machine that had run out of power. The intercom system didn’t work, nor did the multitone door chimes. The Danish dining-room chandelier didn’t work. The bedroom clocks didn’t work. The hair dryer, the electric blankets, the can opener, the toothbrush, and the razor were all unusable. Even the electric-eye garage door was out of business. The Robins family, who had learned to Live Better Electrically, in the enthusiastic advertising phrase of the day, now found themselves reduced to searing steaks over an outdoor barbecue.

Charcoal fires and guttering candles – the stuff of the Middle Ages – were no longer trendy; they were essential. Harriette Browne, a Manhattan housewife, was forced to use the candles intended for her husband’s birthday cake to light the house. People stormed into Ajello’s candle shop and snapped up fancy bayberry candles at $7.50 a pair. The New York Hilton Hotel alone used up thirty thousand candles that night.

Nobody yet knew how it had started, and that included the experts. One small boy in New Haven was certain that it was his fault. He whacked a telephone pole with a stick and every light in town went out. He rushed home, weeping, to his mother. A Manhattan housewife who had just finished trimming the ends of some electrical wires, preparing for the painter, experienced a moment of shock when the blackout struck. “What have I done now?” she blurted. Some thought the power system had been sabotaged, probably by the Russians; others thought the Pentagon, experimenting with new weaponry, was to blame.

It took a week to pinpoint the cause of the trouble at Beck 2 and another month for a commission of inquiry to sort out all the details. Ironically, it was the very obsession with safety that helped trigger the blackout – that, and the rapidly increasing hunger for electrical power in North America.

The northeast power grid, known as the CANUSE system (for Canadian and United States Energy), covered much of Ontario and most of the northeastern United States. It represented a pool of power provided by a loose confederation of forty-two power companies on both sides of the border. Most of this power came from Niagara Falls through the two Beck plants at Queenston and the Robert Moses plant across the river. Combined, they represented the largest generating capacity in one location in North America.

This pooling of resources – the purchase and exchange of power – not only avoided costly duplication but was also efficient, cheap, and reliable. It allowed the transfer of power almost instantaneously to any area that suddenly ran short. The northeast grid was connected to other grids on the continent, so that a housewife in Hamilton, Ontario, plugging in an electric frying pan, might be using power shared by a company in Kansas.

There was, however, a risk. A massive breakdown in one part of the system could create excessive strain and automatically set off a chain reaction throughout the network. Automation had its disadvantages; it required intervention by a human to cut a local system out of the power grid. No fewer than eight buttons at the Consolidated Edison control centre in New York had to be pushed to isolate the city from the rest of the power pool. In the late afternoon of November 9, that had been done too late.

An electrical superhighway of five transmission lines connected Beck 2 with Toronto. On the day of the blackout each of the five was loaded almost to its capacity of 375 megawatts. There was a protective system in operation. If a line became overloaded, a series of circuit breakers, similar to those in an ordinary household, would go into operation and cut off the power. For extra safety, there were backup relays in case a circuit breaker failed to work. Thus there were two sets of failsafe devices standing by to protect the lines going out of Beck 2.

The defect in the system was that Ontario Hydro had not taken into account the increasing demand for power. The relays were set too low. The backup relay that triggered the blackout had been set in 1963 to operate if the line carried more than 375 megawatts of power. The load the line carried was then much less than the maximum. Now, two years later, although the demand had increased, the relays had not been reset.

Power consumption was building up to its winter peak. The weather was getting colder, and one big steam plant in Ontario was out of operation. The load on the lines to Toronto became heavier. The average flow out of Niagara to Toronto reached 365 megawatts that afternoon, dangerously close to the maximum that had been set in 1963. The flows, however, were not constant; they fluctuated from second to second. On November 9, the flow on one line momentarily exceeded the 375 megawatt maximum, and the fail-safe system automatically disconnected the line.

The remaining lines were already close to being overloaded. When the flow on the disconnected line was transferred to the four still operating out of Beck 2, each became loaded beyond the level at which its protective relay was set to operate. They tripped out successively over a two-and-a-half-second period. With these five major lines disconnected, the Beck 2 generator at Niagara was separated from the rest of the network in Ontario. The Moses plant, too, had been sending power to Toronto, and now this power, together with all the power being generated by Beck 2 – a total of 1.5 million kilowatts – had nowhere to go. It reversed itself, cascaded across the Niagara gorge, and was automatically redirected to other lines in the grid leading south and east. This huge surge of power was more than the lines could carry. It knocked out system after system, as one Hydro account put it, “like box cars piling up after an engine jumps the tracks.”