Police cars blocked the intersection at 72nd and West End Avenue. Photo by Priscilla Greene.
City officials closed all traffic below 71st Street around 9:30 p.m. on Saturday as darkness engulfed the area because of a blackout. That included everything from 5th Avenue to the Hudson River, from 71st to 42nd.
A blackout that may have been caused by a manhole explosion on 65th Street has knocked out power to more than 40,000 customers between 72nd and 40th Streets. After the outage, which occurred around 7, traffic lights were out and there was confusion at some intersections, where citizens often tried to direct traffic.
Confusion at intersections. I remember the blackout of 2003. I had to drive the entire length of Brooklyn with no stop lights to pick up my girlfriend at the time. We all knew what to do then. What’s different now?
Did the buildings ON West 72nd lose power?
The 40,000 was off by about 300,000 just on my small block alone West 63rd about 4,000 customers out. 32 blocks could no way be only 40,000 they wanted to minimize the outage. And it took over 2 hours to gain control of the intersections in my area. Did not see any law enforcement for the first two hours of outage at intersections. Big fail for the city…
Re: your “Big fail for the city…”
REALLY? Gee, that’s odd…b/c here on West End Ave. in the 60’s the darkness was constantly punctuated by the blue-and-red lights of police cars and fire trucks racing by. Even ConEd obviously did their job well, as power came back a bit past 10:30, as predicted.
Big fail? Nope, Big Success !