Power outage in North America in November 1965
The November 1965 blackout in North America began in the early evening of November 9, 1965 and was a widespread interruption in electrical power supplies in the northeastern United States and parts of Canada . The states of Connecticut , Massachusetts , New Hampshire , Rhode Island , Vermont , New York , New Jersey and parts of Ontario were affected . Around 30 million people in an area of around 207,000 km² were without care for up to twelve hours.
root cause
The immediate cause was human error. In addition, there was inadequate monitoring of the power grids , which at that time often reached their load limits in this area. A few days earlier, maintenance personnel had set the distance protection relay on a high-voltage line at a power plant near the Niagara Falls to a trip value that was too low. A few days later - it was a cold November afternoon - the power grid in southern Ontario was pushed to the limit of its capacity.
At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time , the incorrectly set distance protection relay triggered below the load limit of the line, causing a main supply line in Ontario to fail. Adjacent lines were subjected to a correspondingly higher load, which also triggered the correctly set network protection elements. The so-called (n – 1) rule was not fulfilled in the power grid at that time, so the error spread like a domino effect in the grid.
The output of the generators in the power plants that are no longer connected to the grid was reduced directly by means of load shedding in order not to be damaged. Reliable load management would have had to separate individual, faulty grid regions from the rest of the north-eastern grid by means of load shedding in the power grid in order to limit the error in spatial expansion. This did not happen.
In Buffalo and Niagara Falls , the supply was maintained by regional power plants, but these were now separated from the rest of the northeastern supply network. In just five minutes, the entire northeastern supply network was in chaos. The southern states , which at that time had only a few connecting lines with the north, were not affected. The region around Fort Erie was also not affected , as older 25 Hertz generators were still running there, which in any case could not be directly connected to networks with a frequency of 60 Hertz .
Radio and television stations affected
Fort Erie was able to receive a New York television station that had backup power.
Most television stations and around half of all radio stations did not have an emergency power supply and failed. On the New York radio station WABC , the presenter Dan Ingram noticed that the turntables were running too slowly. The devices normally used the mains frequency of 60 Hz to ensure synchronization. Although the voltage was initially still normal, the overload in the supply network caused the frequency to drop first to 56 Hz and then to 51 Hz. As a result, the turntables ran slower than usual, which you could clearly hear. Shortly afterwards, the lights in the studio dimmed. The news began at 5:25 p.m. Eastern Time, reporting the self-immolation of Roger Allen LaPorte outside UN headquarters in protest of the Vietnam War . When the next message was to be read, the power supply slowly became weaker and weaker until it came to a complete standstill.
Effects
Some cities that had regional gas-fired power plants continued to be supplied. It got dark around 5:27 p.m. in New York City , but not all neighborhoods were affected. The weather was clear and the full moon was shining so there was some lighting that way. The night remained calm and peaceful. Only five cases of looting were known, whereas the 1977 New York power blackout resulted in massive looting and arson. The night of November 9-10, 1965 was one of the fewest crimes in New York City's history since crime began.
The New York Times ran a ten-page emergency copy using the Newark Evening News presses that still had power.
Restoration of supplies
Many power plants were not black start capable , i. that is, they had no auxiliary power or diesel generators with which to restart their machines. Brooklyn was supplied again until midnight, the rest of New York until about 7 a.m. the next morning. The fact that the Eastman Kodak Company had its own independent power station in Rochester , which kept running and could supply electricity to start the power stations in the area, proved to be beneficial . In this way, the systems could gradually be started up again.
After the power failure, measures were taken to avoid repetition as far as possible. For example, the English Northeast Power Coordinating Council was founded to exchange information between the utilities and to coordinate measures. It was recognized that the power flows in the distribution network were not adequately monitored, which had contributed significantly to this power failure. A timely detection of overloads would have prevented a large-scale collapse of the system.
Myths and Legends
A metropolitan legend says that nine months after the blackout, the birth rate in the affected areas rose sharply for a short time. The legend was started by three articles in the New York Times in August 1966 in which local doctors alleged it. In 1970, a large study by the University of North Carolina found that the birth rate had not increased significantly.
During the blackout, many believed that these were the effects of an incipient nuclear war or that the power failed due to sabotage by a foreign power. The 1960s were the height of the Cold War ; the Cuban Missile Crisis was only three years ago; Kennedy had been murdered two years earlier; the Vietnam War escalated in 1965 .
Since no reason for the power failure was recognizable the next day either, several authors and commentators blamed UFOs for it. These theses can the then zeitgeist attribute . Multiple sightings of UFOs have also been reported. An initially inexplicable lightning bolt near Syracuse in the cloudless night was likely an arc between a power line and a tree.
The screenwriter of the film Where were you when the lights went out? (1968, with Doris Day ) used the 1965 blackout as a framework .
Individual evidence
- ^ David Frum: How We Got Here: The '70s , Basic Books, 2000, ISBN 0-465-04195-7
- ^ From Here to Maternity
- ^ J. Richard Udry, "The effect of the Great Blackout of 1965 on births in New York City," Demography, 7 , pp. 325-327
literature
- Nye, David E. (2010) When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01374-1 .
- Schewe, Phillip. (2006). The Grid: A Journey Through the Heart of Our Electrified World . Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. ISBN 978-0-309-10260-5 .
- Sitts, George, Radio Pierces The Great Blackout , Broadcast Engineering (magazine), December 1965.
- Cave, Damien, Imaginary infants as beacons of hope , Salon.com , October 15, 2001.