The Nation: CAN IT HAPPEN ELSEWHERE?

Outside New York, there were quite a few cocky power company executives who said about the possibility of blackouts: "No, it can't happen here." There were some who pooh-poohed Consolidated Edison's "act of God" explanation as unconvincing. There were a number who blamed Con Ed's own defects and described with pride the superior safety features of their own systems. Yet on closer consideration, few power executives were willing to say flatly—and publicly—that they could offer ironclad security against the same sort of failure.

Systems from Boston to Los Angeles protect themselves with tie-ins to multistate power pools and with automatic "load shedding" controls that temporarily cut off some customers when overloads threaten. Yet New York too relied on those devices, and they were not enough.

Of course some of New York's problems are unique. Nowhere else in the U.S. is power failure likely to last as long as 25 hours; New York has more underground cable than any other system—80,837 miles of it—and it obviously requires more time to repair than do surface lines. And because each section of Manhattan's power grid sucks as much power as a small city, the restoration of power in each neighborhood had to proceed slowly and carefully to avoid sudden overloads on the system. Earlier this month, when fire destroyed an electric cable in St. Louis, it took only eight hours to restore power to the 40-block downtown area.

Power lines travel into most cities from several directions, but all the major cables connecting Con Ed to other pools of electric power run in a single corridor from the north. Last week a storm apparently knocked out all eight of these lines within an hour. Says an executive of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison: "If a major line goes out here, we can interchange a lot more easily and flexibly." One reason for the difference: Commonwealth Edison can more readily obtain right-of-way for power lines in Midwestern farmlands than can Con Ed in the crowded Eastern Megalopolis.

But to the extent that geography adds to the vulnerability of major power lines, New York is not alone. In the peninsular state of Florida, all the lines to power pools elsewhere run up and down in a fairly narrow corridor. Last May 2.5 million residents in five Florida counties (including Miami's Bade County) were without power for approximately four hours after the electric system short-circuited.