Blackout (2015)

[bunniefuu]

KEVIN ZRALY: Imagine yourself on top of One World Trade Center,

on the th floor.

Windows On The World restaurant

was one of the most magical places on earth,

not just in New York City.

On a clear day you could see miles,

planes flying below you.

And :, anybody in the restaurant business

will tell you, is crunch time.

I was walking the floor

and all of a sudden I look to my right,

and Brooklyn is not there anymore.

Okay, it's just, where did Brooklyn go?

And then I quickly glance over, Queens is gone.

It's blackout, there's no... no lights whatsoever.

And as soon as I get up to the window

and we're overlooking Manhattan, downtown Manhattan... [woosh]

lights go out for us.

JACK FEINSTEIN: New York City is a vertical city.

There are people in apartment houses

that are ten stories high.

They don't have any water, they have no lights.

[sirens wailing]

And there is a sense of urgency.

PATRICK MARSHALL: I stopped the car.

And there was about or people in that park.

And I told my partner, I says, "We're not going down there.

Let's get out of here."

[sirens wailing]

CHRISTOPHER VANAGER: It wasn't just nighttime.

It was total darkness.

Everybody was kind of moving in groups.

I'm sure they were scared, too, you know,

because you don't know who's coming at you.

ERNESTO QUIÑONEZ: It was like things had reached this boiling point.

Once the lights went out,

then all hell broke loose.

[alarm bells and shouting]

JONATHAN MAHLER: It's like an orgy of violence, arson, and insanity.

How do you explain that social phenomenon?

RADIO ANNOUNCERS: Hazy, hot and humid.

High in the daytimes up near ,

overnight lows down to around .

A lot of fingers crossed with the continued heat wave.

MARSHALL: July , .

I was working my last :-to-: in a set of five.

It was a beastly hot day.

I distinctly remember it was horrifically hot.

MAHLER: The city's in the midst of a heat wave.

Temperatures were routinely hitting , above .

CHARLIE DURKIN: Around : I headed home.

I got home early enough that I got in the pool with the kids.

Somewhere around :

it was clear that thunderstorms were going to move in,

so we all got out.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Severe thunderstorm warning in effect

for all of Westchester County in New York.

These storms can produce wind gusts miles an hour and more,

lightning, so be advised,

whatever precautions seem advisable.

[thunder]

DURKIN: My daughter was brushing her teeth

and looked out the bathroom window and said,

"What's wrong with the sky, Dad?

It looks strange."

I said, "Yeah, it's because of all the lightning.

There's so much of it, it just stays lit."

That evening there was a lightning strike

on a power line in Westchester County.

The line went out and the demand starts to increase

on some of the surrounding lines.

This sort of essentially sets off a kind of chain reaction,

a sort of a domino effect where another line

suddenly has too much power, and it has to be shut down.

[alarms and phones ringing]

And then another line

is overextended and it has to be shut down.

Everyone's using a lot of power

because they're all running air conditioners.

And before you know it, the city is struggling

to get enough power into the five boroughs.

DURKIN: I got a call maybe a little bit after :

asking me to call the system operator.

I called in and finally said,

there's no other choice, the only alternative was

to disconnect customers.

MAN ON PHONE: You know, you're gonna lose the whole thing.

Tell him this is a dire emergency,

if he can give us any more to give it to us.

OPERATOR: Right.

MAHLER: It is one man who is in charge

of bringing all of this power in.

You have people telling him, yelling at him,

"You have to shut down some of these lines.

You have to do it or the city's gonna lose power."

MAN ON PHONE: Bill, I hate to bother you,

but you'd better shed about megawatts of load

or you're going to lose everything down there...

OPERATOR: Yeah, I... I'm trying to.

MAHLER: Anyone who's ever flown into New York City at night,

who's ever been in New York City at night,

there are lights everywhere.

It's a beautiful image, really, in a way.

It's the city that never sleeps,

the city where the lights are always on.

QUIÑONEZ: I was playing handball with my friends.

And you can still play at night because there was a lot

of lampposts around Jefferson Park.

But then all of a sudden

they started going out, one by one, like pop, pop, pop,

and, uh, we're like, "Wow, what's happening?"

CARL ST. MARTIN: That night I'm on the third floor, windows open.

It was very hot.

So people were outside.

And suddenly the TV went off.

The light went off.

All of a sudden, the noise outside in the street

quickly stopped for a second,

and suddenly you heard a [gasps]

because everybody at the same time realized

something had happened.

VINCENT DUNN: I was up in the office.

I was catching up on some paperwork

and having a cup of coffee and the lights dimmed.

The emergency generator roared on

and somebody shouted, "Blackout!" you know?

ZRALY: One of the things about Windows on the World

right from the very beginning was its dress code.

You had to have a jacket and tie.

The general manager said to me,

"You can tell people they can take their jackets off."

Take their jackets off, you know,

"Okay, you can take your jackets off."

Next thing the ties are coming off.

Next thing, you know, people loosening their shirts.

The general manager got up and immediately spoke,

"Ladies and gentlemen, everybody's getting champagne."

[CBS News theme music playing]

RADIO ANNOUNCER: Now, direct from CBS News.

This special radio net alert news report.

ANNOUNCER: A major power blackout has hit New York City

and surrounding communities.

RADIO HOST: Chuck, if you could, what can you tell us

about the feel for Midtown Manhattan?

REPORTER: Well, George, there are people directing traffic

at the intersections.

I assume many of them are policemen.

Some of them, obviously, are just volunteers,

people who wanted to pitch in.

But in general, people are taking it in good spirit,

and almost a little conviviality going on.

REPORTER: Where were you when the lights went out?

MAN: Radio City Music Hall.

REPORTER: What happened in the music hall?

All of sudden the lights went out.

No picture, no sound, nothing.

And a man made an announcement about, uh,

the power is off in the whole city.

And you're waiting for the subway now?

No, there's no subway running.

So what are you doing here?

I'm on TV.

[people laughing]

FEMALE REPORTER: All I can tell you is

there were severe electrical storms to the north.

Lights totally went out about minutes ago.

MALE REPORTER: All five boroughs are affected so that's the word.

Seven million people are now without power.

JOYCE PURNICK: My beat at the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Post</span> was covering politics.

I went running over to City Hall and I spent the night

in the command center where we got

regular briefings on what they said was going on in the city.

The blackout was not the city's fault, but, um,

it was an opportunity for the mayor, Abe Beame,

to show the people of New York that he was in control.

What are you doing now that this is happening?

We are trying to keep on top through every agency in the city

to do everything possible to keep things moving,

and keep people alerted and have people

who are with city agencies at their stations

in case they are needed.

PURNICK: I'm not sure to this day if he, or even the police commissioner,

actually knew what was going on,

because if they did, they didn't tell us.

VINCENT DUNN: I'm trying to scramble to find out what the big issues are.

I called up the fire battalions,

seeing how things are in their districts.

The phones were evidently working.

And I told them, "Hey, we gotta go down to the subways,

"make sure those people stuck in those hot trains

don't bail out on those third-rail tracks."

And then we have these portable generators that are useful.

You know, hospitals, that's our first priority.

RADIO REPORTER: At Bellevue, the city's largest hospital,

emergency generator service has been halted

by an electrical fire.

Steps are being taken to protect the lives

of patients on respirators

and other necessary electrical equipment.

Dr. Stephen Schwartz at New York's Lenox Hospital

says emergency equipment is working there,

but they are bracing for a possible flood of patients.

DUNN: Then, you know, I got called to go respond to a fire.

And I never returned to the firehouse.

I knew this was going to be a very difficult

and challenging task to put the power system back together.

It's really not made to shut down and restart.

It's made to stay in service.

FEINSTEIN: We knew this was gonna be a long, drawn-out affair.

The restoration plan was out of date

because it hadn't been updated since ,

so between Charlie and I, we made up the plan.

DURKIN: Well, there's only two ways to restore the power.

One is to bootstrap the system up on its own,

or to bring power in from the outside.

We both knew that the quickest, fastest way

was get power in from the outside.

I said, "I'll take a part from the north.

"Jack, you take the part from Long Island Lighting,

and at some point we're gonna meet in the middle."

RADIO REPORTER: Insofar as police are concerned,

all off-duty police officers are being ordered

to their nearest precinct--

not the precinct where they work,

but the precinct of residence.

MARSHALL: We didn't know it was a big blackout.

The lights went out, but who knew

if the lights were gonna stay out?

There was no AM/FM radios in the patrol cars at the time.

So you had no radio communication with the outside.

Our portable radio had died

because of the repeaters being out.

Well, we go back into the station house,

and when we went into the station house,

that's when we really knew that the pot was cooking.

The station house was in darkness,

complete and utter darkness.

Everybody's walking around with flashlights, some candles.

and it looked like a cross between a Boris Karloff movie

and <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Car .</span>

The sergeant said, "Go out, do the best you can,

"come back in a little while.

"We're gonna have a better plan in place.

But go out and do what you can do."

JOSHUA FREEMAN: years earlier, November , New York City lost its power

and it was a very startling event.

But all in all, the city handled it remarkably well.

You know, the urban legend was

that nine months later, births spiked in the city.

I don't know if that's actually true

but I think that captivated the sense that most people had

of almost a kind of moment out of the ordinary

but not a scary or threatening experience.

PURNICK: I remember the blackout of ' as almost being fun.

There was a certain festive atmosphere.

People pulled together.

There were little get-togethers on the streets.

ELZORA WILLIAMSON: Had a bright moon.

Everything was peaceful.

We were directing traffic, and then we had everybody else

start directing traffic with us.

People became helpful to each other,

and it went very, very smoothly.

BRUCE PORTER: The blackout in happened at :.

So the store owners were still in their stores locking up.

The temperature was between and degrees,

right, so people were not out on the street.

FREEMAN: A lot of people simply stayed in their houses.

There was no real sense of panic.

There was no increase in crime.

In the end, really no big deal.

MAHLER: New York had been this great kind of working-class city.

You could come to New York, immigrants, obviously,

from around the world, you could find a job,

you could make a better life.

FREEMAN: Through the mid-s,

New York was doing pretty well economically.

It was both a financial center,

it was a huge manufacturing center.

You'd see blue-collar workers all over the place.

You would see factories making garments,

making electronic goods,

you'd see people working unloading ships on the docks.

MAHLER: New York was historically a city

that did take care of people,

where the subways were heavily subsidized,

where you had great public schools,

where you had this fantastic network of universities

that were free.

And by , I mean, all of this

was just such a distant memory.

The ambitions of the city had diminished so greatly,

and this notion that the city could take care of the people

who lived in it was gone.

NEWSCASTER: Treasury Secretary Simon said today

that the country is in a recession.

NEWSCASTER: For the first time since ,

the nation's unemployment rate has gone above nine percent.

NEWSCASTER: In New York City, the rate of unemployment is much higher

than it is nationally, higher than at any time

since the Great Depression.

FREEMAN: The s was an economically troubled period

for the whole United States

and New York was particularly hard hit

by this general turn downward.

New York hits a % unemployment rate in .

That's just a huge unemployment rate,

and you can feel it all over, every place.

It's visceral.

People hanging out on the streets,

increase in petty crime.

A sense of despair in a lot of areas,

you know, of giving up.

MAHLER: There was this sense that there were no jobs in New York.

People were fleeing the city,

moving to the suburbs if they could.

Some of the middle-class white families move out,

what became known as white flight.

There was just sort of a sense of desperation

about New York at the time.

REPORTER: The city will need more than God's help

to get out of this mess.

New York needs $ million a month

to keep its head above water.

MAHLER: In , New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy,

and it needed a loan from Washington.

And President Ford gave it some thought

and came back to New York and said,

"You're not gonna get a loan."

FREEMAN: After very dramatically turning down a city request,

there was a retreat in Washington from that hard line.

But they would only give New York City the money it needed

to avoid bankruptcy if New York City adopted austerity measures.

That meant cutting public services, laying off

tens of thousands of workers, and other kinds of measures

that assured them that they would get that money back.

DUNN: When those layoffs of police and firefighters came, you know,

we were shocked.

And that was sort of like a little unwritten social contract

that was broken by the city.

The police went on strike.

The fire went on strike.

Sanitation went on strike.

FREEMAN: This big cut in public services at a time

when the private economy is in very bad shape,

it means hardship.

It had immediate impact

on New Yorkers and particularly on poor New Yorkers.

People can't send the kids off the streets into the library.

It's not there anymore.

They can't send them to the after-school athletic program

to keep them safe.

It's not there anymore.

So there's a lot of anger

and also, I think, a sense of abandonment.

DUNN: Graffiti, crime, drugs, homeless people, squeegee people.

People would put in their car windows

"No radio," so people wouldn't break their windows.

So it was, the city was going down.

ERNESTO QUIÑONEZ: When a population is neglected for so long,

and then they keep cutting your social services,

your education, your hospitals, your fire departments,

it's going to boil and sooner or later

something is going to come out of that.

And it wasn't going to be pretty.

BILL MOYERS: This is the Bronx in New York.

One and a half million people live in this borough.

It's the home of the New York Yankees.

It has also become the arson capital of the world.

Once that smoke on the horizon

signified industry, progress, jobs.

Now it means someone is burning down a building.

DUNN: We call those years the fire years

when the city was burning down.

When I came in the fire service,

a busy fire company did , to , runs a year.

In the s we were all doing , alarms a year.

Smoking carelessness, falling asleep with a cigarette,

cooking fires and electrical fires.

They were the three top causes.

We've got a fire on the fifth floor, apartment I.

Occupants are...

DUNN: But then there was arson-- arson for profit,

arson for revenge, you wanted to get even to a neighbor.

You had arson for fun.

A couple of kids with a can of gasoline

could light a vacant building

and have a ball watching firefighters come

with big aerial ladders on a night, hot night

and would watch us throw water into this building.

You had fires for boredom.

CARL ST. MARTIN: The block below me, of the houses,

maybe only five of them hadn't had a fire.

You knew that there's a chance that your house

could catch on fire.

So it caused that next person next door to move.

Now that landlord didn't get his rent.

This led to the temptation for some people

to consider burning the building and collecting the insurance.

And it became a domino effect.

MAHLER: On top of all that...

There was a serial k*ller on the loose in New York.

REPORTERS: In New York, the search continues for the Son of Sam,

the object of one of the biggest manhunts in this city's history.

The k*ller has taunted authorities

by writing two letters, signed Son of Sam.

PURNICK: The NYPD was then and still is

the preeminent police department in the country,

and he was eluding the NYPD.

Everybody was very tense.

And it contributed to the sense of nobody was in control.

It was becoming embarrassing to say you were a New Yorker

after having been so many years

when you were proud to be a New Yorker.

The city was falling apart.

CHRIS "DOC" VANAGER: By :, that's when I started to hear the noises.

And first my mother goes, "What is that?"

You heard these bumping noises.

Just bump-bump-bump-bump outside.

And so my mother opens the door and she looks.

And I stick my head out

and the staircase door was open a little bit

and you see a washing machine going up the stairs.

Then after that a refrigerator comes upstairs.

Then those giant furniture TVs, you know, the old Zeniths

with the sound system in and the record player,

those started going up.

And it was just box after box after box after box.

ST. MARTIN: It just happened.

Like a tinderbox.

It went from being lights to being looting.

[sirens wailing]

VANAGER: All I remember was people with stuff--

coats, clothes...

Like people just have this stuff draped over their arms like,

"Yo, you wanna buy this? You wanna buy that?"

They stole clothes, electronics,

just everything you could think of.

MAHLER: It happened within minutes in all of these neighborhoods.

Every single borough in New York was affected by the looting.

And it happens, I mean, just instantaneously.

Ace Pontiac stored brand new Pontiacs in its garage

and the fire department had a rule that if you stored cars

inside a building, you had to leave the key in the ignition

and you had to put two dollars worth of gas in the tank.

Well, all of these cars vanished

in the first hour and a half.

MARSHALL: There was people everywhere.

Hundreds.

Hundreds per block.

[sirens pulsing]

We responded to a call for assistance

from Wyckoff Heights Hospital.

And the staff in the emergency room was being hard pressed

to keep up with the injuries because the looters

were suffering such vicious cuts from the glass.

There was blood everywhere.

There was people with some hellacious injuries

and it really was starting to slide.

ST. MARTIN: I was in medical school, so, you know,

I figured might as well just go and work at the hospital.

It was packed.

Full-blown, people outside in the street waiting to get in.

I went in and there were some doctors there.

And I explained that I was a medical student

and he asked me had I sutured before.

And I said, "Well, I'd done a little bit but not really."

He says, "Okay, come, come, I'll show you.

We need your help, we need your help."

All night long I was in a corner just closing up wounds.

WILLIAMSON: We had our store, which was entitled Trophies By Syl.

It was a sporting goods and trophy shop.

We thought of it as more than a store.

We taught the young people how to open a bank account,

how to fill out the forms.

My husband would go with them, show them how to do that.

That evening the lights went out as we were eating.

And my husband said, "Oh maybe we better get back over there."

And I said to him, "Oh, let me do the dishes first."

I probably lost about an hour.

When we got to maybe five, six blocks away from our store,

we started seeing our merchandise in the street.

I just drove up on the sidewalk and I parked the car

directly where the doorway was.

The people who were inside, when they saw my husband,

they said, "Here's Mr. Syl, Mr. Syl is here,"

and they started running.

It was sad in some ways because some people that you saw

would be people you would not have expected

to see in that capacity.

And, and yet they were there.

ALAN RUBIN: I figured, "Okay, I'll walk over to the store."

And I saw a crowd on the side of the store.

They were pushing and shoving to get into the store

and people were coming out carrying things.

They got out hi-fi.

They got out TVs.

The store next to me, the owner came over to me and he says,

"I'm sh**ting in the air to scare them away."

He said, "Do you need a g*n?"

And I said, "No way."

I said, "I'll get hurt if I have a g*n."

I couldn't do anything about it so I just was watching.

And my knees started to shake.

WILLIAMSON: We had to stay there all night

because if we left, they were gonna come in and take the rest.

There was no police to stop them.

Who would stop them from taking whatever else was there?

PORTER: One problem with the police is they were told to report

to the nearest precinct to them.

Almost none of them live in the affected precincts

in the poor neighborhoods.

The major looting occurred when there were almost

no policemen on the street.

MAHLER: It took hours to get cops to the neighborhoods

that needed them most.

By the time they get there, this thing is on.

Bring them out, bring them out!

PORTER: There were a lot of merchants and people who wanted police

to come to their stores, stand there with their r*fles

in their hands and keep the people out.

Well, the police didn't have anywhere near the manpower

or police power to do that.

MAN: The whole Bronx is going, man.

The whole Bronx is going.

We'd like to sit here and watch it, but we can't.

No, that's all right.

MARSHALL: Our instructions were, "Do the best you can."

And we did the best we could.

We had sticks.

We had our hands.

You'd grab people and just toss them out.

We were so outnumbered, we'd push them back

as far as we could.

The people would only respond so far.

And then they would start hurling rocks and bottles at us.

And then there was a pitched battle in the street.

After a while there was what can you do?

It was insanity.

GEORGE MICHAEL: It's : on WABC in New York.

We switch now to Steve O'Brien.

O'BRIEN: Thank you, George.

Walking into one of the neighborhood establishments,

we found still an atmosphere

of extreme levity considering the situation.

Anyway, people are feeling no pain

in most of the establishments around the area.

PORTER: The lights went out and the beer came out,

and we had candles and we had a block party.

I didn't find out until the next day that there was any looting.

Right, I mean, if you didn't live on a commercial street,

you didn't know the looting had happened.

KEVIN ZRALY: We were on an island in the sky,

isolated from whatever else was happening

in all of New York City.

We had these emergency lights,

but it wasn't enough...

I mean, so we started bringing candles in.

In hindsight, I don't think that was a good idea

because the candles also gave off heat.

Air conditioning now has been out for... since :.

But still people... some people we had to ask to leave.

It was that kind of thing, you know.

They liked the champagne part.

It sort of sounds like the <span tts:fontStyle="italic">Titanic</span>

when we talk about, "Did the band play on?" you know?

We had a three-piece combo of piano, bass, and guitar.

The piano continued on.

MAHLER: It's the city of rich and the city of the poor.

And if you weren't in one of those neighborhoods,

you know, if you were on the Upper East Side

enjoying a candlelit dinner on your roof...

You had no idea what was going on all around you.

♪ We tripped the lights fantastic ♪

♪ On the sidewalks of New York. ♪

[applause]

GUS ENGELMAN: George, I just had a Con Ed spokesman on the phone

to see if we can get a better idea of when Con Ed

will be restoring that power.

Here's Ed Livingston right now.

LIVINGSTON: We can't... we really can't estimate, Gus.

We're working as hard as we can and as fast as we can,

but I don't want to build up

any hopes and pick a number of hours

because we just can't be sure right now.

JACK FEINSTEIN: We were moving in a step-by-step, very methodic,

logical way of picking up the load.

The generation was coming on slowly.

I'm busy concentrating and I turn around

and there's the chairman of the board

and the president of the company.

CHARLIE DURKIN: They just wanted me to proceed with a sense of urgency,

which we were.

Each time we came to a point where we could pick up

another network, it took about minutes.

That doesn't seem like a lot of time

when you're talking one network.

But when you have networks, it's a lot of time.

Electricity is a kind of a keystone for civility

and if we can get the streetlights back on,

the traffic lights working and all that kind of thing,

there was a much better likelihood that the police

and so forth can maintain control.

PORTER: The first group, who went into the stores

ten minutes after the blackout occurred,

these were a criminal element.

Then the stores were open.

And then another class of looters came in,

people who did not have a criminal background,

whom it would not occur to to go and smash the window

of a store and go in and grab something.

But they sat in their hot apartments

seeing people run in and grab stuff and they said,

"You know, I could really use some Pampers."

QUIÑONEZ: I remember the rattling.

It's a very distinct rattling.

A whole bunch of housewives had looted the supermarket

at the corner where I used to live, and what they had done

is they had taken pantyhose and they had tied

shopping carts together so they could make a shopping cart train

and then they had loaded all the stuff,

all this merchandise-- Pampers, toilet paper, food--

on these carts and were pushing them home.

PORTER: These were the people who tended to get arrested.

They had never been arrested before.

And here they were arrested and charged with stealing a couch

or some clothes.

There were not a package of Pampers survived the looting.

MARSHALL: Anybody and everybody, children, women, men,

people with jobs, people without jobs.

They all got caught up in the moment.

They didn't feel like they were committing a crime

because the whole general atmosphere,

the whole feeling of it was,

"Everybody's doing it, why not me?"

OFFICER: Hide your faces, smile, smile.

They're hiding their faces.

REPORTER: Is this for looting?

Looting, looting.

FREEMAN: Looting is a complicated thing.

People do it because they're greedy, because they need stuff.

It's also sometimes fun.

It's the people on the bottom being on the top for a moment,

and they know it's only for a moment,

but who's going to stop you?

Who's going to stop you?

No one can stop you.

That can be a thrill.

QUIÑONEZ: It was the neighborhoods that had been neglected that rioted,

and it was basically people who were poor and hungry.

The media paints it as "Look at these criminals, it's race!"

But it's not so much race as it is class.

Black people didn't go after white people.

Latinos did not go after the Italians.

It was more about class.

We didn't have, so we went, not even after those who had.

We went after their stuff.

It's an expression of anger,

it's an expression of neglect, and it's an expression of need.

DUNN: If you don't control the crime problem

and the people causing the disorder,

it becomes a fire problem.

The dispatcher ordered us to go from fire to fire.

You were driving in the streets.

People were waving to you for help, you couldn't stop.

Buildings were burning.

Cars in the street were burning.

Garbage in lots were burning.

You know, you'd hear the dispatcher,

"No companies available, no companies available."

They would only send us to big store fires.

You know, we would go to these big supermarket fires,

appliance store fires, which were being broken into,

looted, and burned.

WILLIAMSON: Not only did they loot the stores, they burned them.

And to me, that was the ultimate violation.

You took everything, now why are you going

to burn the store down as well?

DUNN: Fire is a special effect.

You light a car, you've got a spectacular event.

Fire, you know, it's got noise.

It's got smoke.

It's got flame.

It's got sound.

It was a crazy scene, you know, it was something

out of like a world w*r.

[fire crackling, sirens blaring]

REPORTER: New York City in the early morning,

after a night of no electric power and so no lights,

elevators, subway trains or any trains, airports,

air conditioning, traffic signals, television.

What it did have in the dark streets

was a wild outburst of crime-- arson, looting,

mugging and , false fire alarms.

MAHLER: After the blackout, everyone is trying to make sense

of what has happened to New York.

There was this sense that New York is not just

in financial trouble, not just struggling.

But there's something really existentially,

foundationally wrong with New York,

and New York is in real, real trouble.

VANAGER: When we got up that next day, I got on my bike

and rode around the neighborhood,

and you just saw everything was gone.

And that's when it kind of sunk in

that nothing's gonna be the same.

You know, nothing's ever gonna be the same.

And you just go,

"What are people supposed to do now?"

You know?

QUIÑONEZ: It sort of felt like some b*mb had gone off

but instead of destroying the buildings,

all you had was a whole bunch of confetti and paper.

And it was a very quiet city.

I think that one of the reasons for this quietness

was because a lot of frustration had been released

and even if you yourself had not gone out there

to loot, others had.

And somehow, I think,

that brings you some sort of catharsis.

ST. MARTIN: Once the sun was up, the storeowners were now there.

Many of them had roots in the neighborhood

and were actually connected to the neighborhood.

So they were hurt, and we were hurt.

STORE OWNER: They got everything.

I lost all my money.

I work about ten years for this.

I lost everything.

I don't have no insurance, nothing.

I have three kids, a wife.

I lost everything.

MAN: You've got these people now,

they are worried about their business

as to whether they can start again in a community like this.

As to whether they are gonna trust these people

around here, I doubt it.

The merchants,

they're not gonna trust these people after this.

I wouldn't trust them.

REPORTER: So, yourself, what are you going to do now?

STORE OWNER: Well, I tell you, I'm going to leave this great Big Apple

to those that want to stay here.

I can't fight this anymore.

ALAN RUBIN: Early the next morning, I walk into the store

and the lights were still out, but there's enough light for me

to see where I'm going.

It was horrendous.

It was a lot of work.

There was gonna be no guarantee that we could make it.

More to cut out all the questions,

not any major statement, I just put a sign

on the window that said, "We're staying."

ELZORA WILLIAMSON: They had taken so much.

We lost, I think it was...

something like $, worth of merchandise.

My whole thought was, "How am I gonna stay in business?"

My husband, he just sat down

with people who looted the store,

talked to them, told them he was disappointed.

But he never reacted in such a way

that would have been a negative on his part.

You know, now that was something I could not do.

I could not sit down and look a person in the eye

and say, "It's okay."

It was not okay.

No matter how long we stayed, the store never really was

what it had been all those years ago.

VANAGER: My neighborhood stayed that way for probably years.

That whole strip never opened back up ever again.

Everybody that lived there, those mom-and-pop stores,

they just shut down and they left.

MARSHALL: We got finished at about : in the morning.

I just... I sat on the hood of the car

and looked down Broadway.

I said, "I think the neighborhood's done.

I think the back has finally been broken."

And it was.

I truly believe that that night took the carpet

out from under the people.

REPORTER: What triggered the blackout?

A federal report places the primary blame

on Consolidated Edison, saying it was unprepared

to deal with the crisis touched off by a severe thunderstorm.

JACK FEINSTEIN: A blackout is almost similar to an airplane crash.

It's never just one item.

From the first lightning strike to the complete system shutdown,

it's a series of events that if any one of them didn't occur

or was responded to differently, would've prevented the blackout.

REPORTER: It was a night of terror that lasted for hours.

What happened to this blinded city?

, people arrested.

policemen injured.

, businesses looted or set on fire.

MAHLER: The blackout produced the largest mass arrest

in the city's history.

We're talking about thousands of people.

And we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars

of damage and stolen property.

DUNN: There were , major fires that night, , major fires.

I mean that's mind-boggling.

There's a social order that's necessary to live

in these dense urban areas that broke down that night.

REPORTER: In the worst slums of the city,

the light of mindless violence lit up the sky,

as the blackout divided the town into two societies,

separate and unequal.

FREEMAN: The blackout gave you

an appreciation of the fragility of urban life.

You flip the switch and darkness turns to light

and you just totally take all this stuff for granted.

And an event like that makes you realize how contingent,

how fragile all that is.

You can't hit your mom because she's your mom,

so you hit your little brother.

Something like that is what was happening.

You couldn't go after these politicians

that were k*lling your neighborhood.

So, you went after your little brother.

You went after each other.

DUNN: If you wanted to say, "When was the bottom

of the decaying, declining New York City?"

you would have to say , the blackout.

We've had some very good, prosperous times

in New York City since then.

But this is always there as an example of what could happen.