The big apple has been plunged into darkness. Saturday, July 13, in the evening, a giant blackout deprived part of Manhattan of power for a few hours, blocking elevators, turning off traffic lights and illuminated signs in Times Square, New York’s tourist hotspot.
West of Manhattan, about 73,000 users were deprived of electricity in the early evening, said at a press briefing, the CEO of the company ConEdison, John McAvoy, who did not specify the the exact cause of the incident, simply referring to a “significant disturbance”.
Return around 11 p.m.
Power began to return shortly after 10 p.m. local (2 a.m. GMT) in the Times Square neighborhood, a recovery that sparked a clamor in the streets, Agence France-Presse found. By 11 p.m., five of the six electrical zones were back on and ConEd planned to restore power everywhere by midnight.
The origin of the blackout “appears to be something gone wrong in the way they transmit electricity from one part of town to another to meet demand,” MSNBC told Iowa. where he was in the countryside, the mayor of the city Bill de Blasio.
Disrupted transport
Shortly after the outage began, which occurred at around 6:45 p.m. local time (10:45 p.m. GMT), dozens of Internet users posted photos of dark underground stations on social networks. According to the local CBS channel, passengers were stranded for more than half an hour in a train between two stations.
While waiting for the power to be restored, the New York transport authority, the MTA, had asked travelers to “avoid underground stations” in Manhattan, that is to say almost the entire network. At the end of the evening, she indicated that the traffic was gradually returning to normal.
Canceled shows
On the surface – with the power cut having been total in the Broadway and Hell’s Kitchen theater area, further west – the traffic lights had ceased to function and the giant billboards in the Times Square district had gone out. . The only bright spots were the flashing lights of police cars and fire engines.
New York has plenty of ideas, and just minutes after the break began, passers-by also tried to regulate traffic, while the musical comedy troupe Hadestown, that of Come from Away and a choir performing at the prestigious Carnegie Hall relocated to the sidewalk to continue their show. Most Broadway shows have been canceled, including blockbuster musicals Hamilton or The Lion King.
At Madison Square Garden, Jennifer Lopez also had to cancel her show just minutes after the concert started. She posted a video on Twitter to apologize and announce the postponement of the show. Not far away, several dozen customers of the Row NYC hotel on 8th Avenue were waiting outside the establishment, sitting on the sidewalk. Alba Moreno, a 16-year-old Spanish tourist, explained that hotel staff asked them not to try to enter the property, which lacked all lighting and working elevators.
Many interventions
Firefighters said on Saturday that they were responding to many requests for intervention, including about people stuck in elevators. “We were inside [dans leur chambre, NDLR] when the lights went out and we went down the stairs, ”said Monique Otero, a hotel guest. A back-up generator then kicked in, she explained, opening the doors of the elevators, in which customers were stuck.
Some then chose to use these elevators to descend, but found themselves trapped when the back-up generator shut down a few seconds later. A couple of Australian tourists thus remained stranded for nearly three hours, explained Monique Otero. Ironically, the blackout occurred on the anniversary of the “Blackout”, the gigantic power cut that affected almost the entire city, in 1977.
In the midst of the economic crisis, New York had been the scene of looting and vandalism, with more than a thousand businesses affected. Power was only restored after 25 hours and after several hundred arrests. Two other massive blackouts also hit New York in 1965 and 2003.
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