New York City’s first great blackout struck during the evening rush hour of November 9, 1965, trapping nearly 800,000 people in subways and elevators. The incident inspired the Doris Day movie “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?”

The outage originated on a single line bringing power from Niagara Falls to the city. New York City and much of New England are interconnected on a great power grid. As a relay blew on the line from Niagara Falls, the electricity had to go somewhere else in the grid. The grid is designed to even out the flow of power to areas that have higher demand. It was not prepared to handle the sudden excess of electricity.
As a result, relays began to fail all over the region and power companies were forced to shut off their generators for fear they would be damaged. It only took a few minutes to blackout a huge region from Vermont and Massachusetts all the way to parts of Pennsylvania. It looked as if someone had pulled the plug at 5:28 p.m. in New York.

It was a scene no one was prepared for. The vibrant, active city plunged into total darkness, the only light coming from the moon and from automobile headlamps. Runways went dark at New York City airports. Traffic came to a standstill as traffic lights went out.

Resolute New Yorkers took the blackout in stride, some having to walk many miles to get home. There was an atmosphere or calm and unity in the city, with people sharing radios, flashlight and candles as they coped with the emergency. People turned out into the streets, which seemed more like impromptu street festivals than a disaster.

The calm of the 1965 blackout was nothing like chaos that occurred twelve years later in July 1977 when another major power outage plunged all of the city into the dark again.

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