THE BLACKOUT: NIGHT OF TERROR

• Share

(10 of 10)

Most of these could be made up later, when banks, brokerages and other businesses reopened. But the far more important price cannot be tallied. What had the city lost in terms of morale and image? Deputy Mayor Osborn Elliott, in charge of keeping old jobs in the city and bringing in new ones, announced the blackout at least had not caused a group of oil suppliers from Houston and New Orleans to drop consideration of moving some of their offices to the city. But how many businessmen thought of moving out? How many will become more difficult to sell on moving in? At best, Elliott's job has been a holding action, and last week's crisis, he said with great understatement, "doesn't help."

Speaking of the emergency procedures that were supposed to have kept the electricity from failing.

Federal Power Commission Chairman Richard Dunham remarked. "Quite obviously something didn't fit." The same might be said of the city's comity of neighborhoods, the uneasy web that both binds and separates rich and poor, white and nonwhite. As in all big-city riots, the chief victims of the long hours of darkness were the people who live in the devastated ghettos and have no other place to go. No amount of booty can compensate the looters for what they have lost.