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Post by Clipper on Jun 9, 2012 20:48:30 GMT -5
Where were you when the lights went out? Dave suggested that it would be an interesting subject for a thread. Those of us old enough to remember must have some interesting stories to tell about the experience.
I was at a fund raising dinner of some sort at the Diplomat Restaurant in North Utica. We never did get our dinner. We were listening to a speaker when the lights went out. We ended up eating salad and dessert by candle light because they couldn't cook the entree's.
I ended up driving an elderly widow friend of my mom's home. She lived on Proctor Blvd in South Utica. It was very eery looking, driving up Genessee Street in total darkness, other than the moonlight.
We lived in Newport at the time. After dropping that woman off and returning to North Utica where mom and dad were having coffee with a friend on Keyes Road, we drove home to Newport. We stopped at the top of the hill on Newport Road to turnaround and look back over the valley. Normally you could see the lights of Utica and all the villages all the way down the valley to Herkimer. It was a very strange sight to see. There were a few headlights from cars that were traveling on Rt 5 and 5S and a few lights visible in the city where police cars and a few others were out wandering about. It was almost apocalyptic looking.
Does anyone remember how long the power was off that night? I don't remember. I almost recall it coming back on very late that night. I do remember that it was a fairly cold night and that we had built a fire in the fireplace because the furnace would not run without power. We had settled in to sleep on the living room floor when the lights came back on. We then all gathered our blankets and crawled into our beds.
So, where were you during that blackout?
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Post by dave on Jun 9, 2012 23:09:50 GMT -5
What I remember being a bit scary was no one knew what was going on. A few of the radio stations were on the air with low power in the Syracuse area where we were living at the time.
Each report told us the blackout area seemed to be larger and larger until it became apparent that what we thought of as half the US was without power. There was no thought of terrorism in 1965, but we had all seen enough James Bond movies to be thinking the Russians or some demented Goldfinger might be responsible. It seemed a monumental coincidence that so many separate but interconnected power service areas could all go down at the same time. It would take a bit of investigation by the power companies to realize that before their very eyes was a system of dominoes they never thought would pull each other down.
I was newly married and commuting to school in Oswego from our trailer behind a gas station on Fairmont Corners in the Town of Camillus up the hill from the Fairmont Fair shopping center.
I first noticed something wrong on my way home from school about 5 pm as I sat at a stoplight on Hiawatha Blvd and watched a red stop light fade in and out. I thought I might have abused my eyes studying and blinked repeatedly. Then I noticed the street lights were dimming as well.
This continued until I got home. My wife had arrived before me and was trying to figure out what had gone wrong with our circuits. I put a voltmeter on the power outlet and saw the voltage drop to 50 vac or so and realized our motors would get burned up with that kind of voltage. All we had running was the refrigerator and so I turned it off, over her protests. (Next wife, I vowed, will understand P=I*2R! Although to be fair, her lack of such knowledge has not hindered our marriage in the past 47 years.)
We had no candles when the power finally went completely, so I drove down to the grocery store (A&P?) in the shopping center, where I was met at the door by a young man with flashlight who offered to guide a group around the store as we searched for items. All I needed was candles. Come to think of it, that's all I had money for. Knowing where the paper goods were I made my way down the aisles in the dark while the group with the flashlight began their trek through aisles to get everyone's supplies.
Clipper's comment about the entire valley being dark reminds me of West Genesee Street in Fairmont which was basically closing down, except for all the cars coming out of Syracuse. Later that evening when cars were off the road, the street was the blackest anyone had seen it since probably forced air raid blackouts during WW 2. Interestingly, and this might make another good thread, a complete shutdown of West Genesee street would occur in another 5 or 6 months during the famous February Blizzard of '66 when we got 103 inches of snow in 3 days. (Oswego got about 108 and Watertown 142.)
As I groped my way back to where I thought the paper goods and candles should be, I might as well have been in a clothes closet with the door closed. I could see absolutely nothing, except an occasional stab of light on the ceiling from the flashlight somewhere across the store where the group of merry shoppers seemed to be having a grand old time. I stood there and realized I was not going to find candles this way. A thought occurred that I could probably feel my way to the coolers and steal a beer while I was standing around here without a prayer of locating the candles. I pushed the larcenous thought from my mind and instead started to make my way over to the group. Turns out they were coming my way and when we met up we were quite near the candles and nowhere near where I thought they would be. We all paid up and the manager made change from a deposit bag since the cash registers weren't working. Out in the parking lot 5 or 6 Trooper cars were having a pow wow not far from where I parked my car. I went up to the group standing outside their cars and asked one of them if he had any news about what was going on. They didn't know, he said, and wondered what I had heard on my car's AM radio.
I don't remember how long the blackout lasted. Seems to me all the power was back on sometime the next morning, but there were spots where crews had to get around to and manually throw breakers back on. It took a few days before everyone had power in the Northeast. The phone system did work, but so many people were trying to call their Uncle Harry to find out if he had power or knew what was going on that it was difficult to get a dial tone until the following day. Far worse off were people stuck in elevators. Doris Day made a cinematic tribute to the event in a movie the next year that posed the question half the people in the US were asking each other for months, "Where were you when the lights went out?" And yes, it's true, there was an upsurge in births 9 months later in the Northeast.
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Post by Clipper on Jun 10, 2012 14:00:15 GMT -5
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Post by virgilgal on Jun 12, 2012 8:41:57 GMT -5
I don't know if it is an indication of bad memory or of the frequent power losses we experienced when we were growing up in Vernon Center but I cannot recall the big blackout. I do remember our family protocol for power losses. We closed off the doors to the kitchen and turned on the oven on the cook stove. The parrot in his cage was hung from the ceiling near the stove and we all sat at the table playing board games by candlelight. It was actually kind of a fun event and I know it happened with some regularity as lines came down from snow, wind or accidents. We lived in a massive old house and the rest of the house would get incredibly cold normally so after a few hours of no heat it was a real challenge to make our ways upstairs and climb into icy cold beds to try to sleep. We had layers of shrunken army blankets on each bed and they were small enough that if you moved the sides would gape a bit instantly cooling the whole bed. When the wind blew, so did the curtains on the windows until some years after we moved there we had siding, insulation and storm windows installed. It was never comfortable in that house but it did get to be livable.
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