Blackout '03: Lights Out

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That's because by then he and the other big-city mayors knew that there were no quick, easy fixes. Getting a power system up and running after a blackout--called a black start--involves much more than just flipping a switch. Power-generating units have to be brought online one at a time. If one power plant were brought up with all of Toledo waiting with its air conditioners in the on position, it would just shut down again. So technicians have to carve up cities into electrically isolated pieces and bring each neighborhood back up one by one in bite-size chunks that the system can handle. As they build more and more islands, they can start to string them together, but try to move too fast, and the whole thing goes dark again. Nuclear-power plants usually take at least 24 hours to restart.

In the meantime, the cities had no choice but to cope as best they could--get the sanitation workers out to harvest the remains of every dead refrigerator, get the buses and trains moving. Ohio Governor Bob Taft declared a state of emergency in Cleveland after all four pumping stations that lift water out of Lake Erie went out and residents were ordered to boil their water at least through Sunday. Even the beaches were off limits for swimming after a sewage discharge sent bacteria levels soaring. At least one house fire in the city was blamed on burning candles.

By nightfall in many places, time seemed to be moving backward, back to the days of candlelight and carriages and cigar boxes as cash registers, when ice cream sold for a nickel a scoop. As it grew darker, many of the bars in New York City even went back to the days when people were allowed to smoke indoors, in the belief that the police had better things to worry about than enforcing the new ban. Tourists curled up on the street in Times Square, on library steps and in hotel ballrooms; city residents slept on their roofs, where it was cooler. By morning you could buy T shirts reading WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT? with the date, confirming New York's position as the capital of capitalism. Meanwhile, half a world away, the few residents of Baghdad who had electricity sat stuck to their TV sets, watching the superpower grope in the dark. "We stayed up for an hour watching it," said a taxi driver, "until the electricity shut down." --Reported by Amanda Bower, Sean Gregory and Jyoti Thottam/New York; Laura Eggertson/Ottawa; Steven Frank/Toronto; Elisabeth Kauffman/Nashville; Eric Roston, Douglas Waller and Mark Thompson/Washington; Fran Stewart/Cleveland; and Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas