The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965

[n2ize]

Back in November of 1965 much of the northeast was unexpectedly without power. The blackout started right after the start of rush hour in NYC. I remember it well. I was living in East New York Brooklyn at the time. My Dad was at work in Manhattan and the J-train which he would normally ride home wasn't running, as were none of the subways running. He walked the entire way home, from Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn. Quite a long walk on a dark night.

Here is some news footage from that November night. It's kind of weird to see the news studio lighted by candles.

[XE1/N5AL]

Notice the dark image at the center of the candle flame, which was typical with the old "image orthicon" camera tubes.

I would have been a first grader at the time. But, we lived in Dallas, far away from the affected areas. So, I don't have any personal recollections of the event. I have heard a lot about it in the years that followed.

[n2ize]

Notice the dark image at the center of the candle flame, which was typical with the old "image orthicon" camera tubes.

I would have been a first grader at the time. But, we lived in Dallas, far away from the affected areas. So, I don't have any personal recollections of the event. I have heard a lot about it in the years that followed.

i noticed that as well. Not sure why the flame appears dark. I was in 2nd grade when this happened. Since then we have had 2 more major blackouts in the northeast. One in 1977 and the most recent in 2002. I had school the next morning. The power in Brooklyn was back sometime in the early morning hours.

Actually the most inconveniencing blackouts (in terms of impacting me and my immediate family) were not the major ones but the localized ones arising from storms. Such as the 5 day outage we had via Hurricane Sandra.

During the 1977 blackout my Dad worked for Con Edison (the power company that supplies NYC and it's northern suburbs). He used to work late nights and I remember he went to work that night and drove to the Con Ed facility. You would thing that if anyone had power during a blackout that Con Ed would be lit up bright. But his facility was completely blacked out too. At around 4 or 5 AM a supervisors said, "send these guys home !! They can't do anything from here !! Their families need them more than we do !!" So he got home early. But there was plenty of overtime in the weeks to come. What breaks down must be fixed.

[W5BRM]

Wondering how they powered the cameras without power.

[n2ize]

Wondering how they powered the cameras without power.

Perhaps wind up or battery ?

[NQ6U]

Wondering how they powered the cameras without power.

I wondered the same. My guess was that the studio had some minimal amount of backup power, enough to run the cameras but not the huge banks of lights typically used in TV production.

[N2NH]

i noticed that as well. Not sure why the flame appears dark. I was in 2nd grade when this happened. Since then we have had 2 more major blackouts in the northeast. One in 1977 and the most recent in 2002. I had school the next morning. The power in Brooklyn was back sometime in the early morning hours...

The most recent was on 8/14/2003. I remember it because it was my 50th birthday and I was coming home from a birthday dinner when I noticed all the traffic lights were out. Someone on the bus said that it was all over the Northeast and south-eastern Canada. I had missed two buses on the way from the mall and we caught up to them when we got near the Verrazano Bridge. After a hour wait, they took everyone off the other two buses (the ones I missed) and put them on mine. 2 helicopter gun ships were hovering near the bridge and we were the only thing on it - traveling at 5 miles per hour. We were so overloaded that's as fast as the bus would go. I could not forget that day. Worked in the dark that night.

In '77 I was on duty at WPAT in New Jersey but we had our FM XMTRs in NYC. They went down and we ended up with the forth backup, an old FM Transmitter that Armstrong built right in the building- it hadn't been used in decades. I got it up to 100 mw and that was all I could coax out of it. My boss got it up to 28 Watts and we stayed on the air. Coming back was eerie. The NJ National Guard wouldn't let you into the Lincoln Tunnel unless you had NY plates on your car.

The '65 blackout, I was in 6th grade. There was a restaruant in my building and I got to eat all the ice cream that I wanted as it was going bad. Being November, I didn't eat much. The school got it's lights back around 11PM, but a few blocks away where I lived, we didn't get power until nearly 12 hours later. Got a rare day off from school.