A Bushwick storeowner returns to his shop to find that everything has been taken. (JAMES HAMILTON)
Two boys inside a cleaned-out store in Bushwick.
(JAMES HAMILTON)
A house bums in Bushwick during the summer of 1977.
(STEVEN SCHER)
David Berkowitz being led into a police precinct for booking.
(FRED CONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Mayor Beame being kissed by his wife, Mary, as he concedes the 1977 Democratic primary. (JAMES HAMILTON)
Mario Cuomo campaigning at a beach club in Brooklyn during the summer of 1977. (JANIE EISENBERG)
The two run-off candidates at a debate during the 1977 mayoral campaign. (JANIE EISENBERG)
Reggie turns and tips his hat to the crowd after his second home run in game six of the 1977 World Series. (LARRY MORRIS/THE NEW
YORK TIMES)
Reggie trying to get off the field and into the dugout after the last out of game six.
(LARRY MORRIS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
. In the interim, Kennedy figured he’d help Jurith get his overtaxed lines deloaded. He told New England’s power coordinator what was happening and instructed him to ease off a little. Then he asked Long Island’s system operator if he could increase generation to pick up some of the slack. Long Island’s capacity was limited, but the system operator offered to do what he could. “You guys in trouble, or what?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Kennedy answered. “It’s Indian Point 3.”
At 8:45 p.m. Kennedy called the Con Ed control room again to confirm that the reserve generators were being fired up. He was told that they were.
Con Ed had two main sources of backup power in the city, steam units and gas turbines. The steam units worked like giant boilers. A furnace burned oil, which heated water in a boiler to produce steam. The steam pushed against blades to drive a generator.
The gas turbines (GTs) were faster and more efficient. Con Ed had brought them online over the course of the past decade, in response to criticism after the 1965 power failure that it didn’t have enough electricity available within the confines of the city itself. GTs operate much like jet engines: They combine compressed air with fuel and then ignite the mixture of the two. The resulting gases push against the turbine blades to produce energy. Unlike steam units, the GTs, which were stationed in four sites around the city, could be operated by remote control.
At 8:55, Con Ed was still generating just 30 percent of the electricity that it had assured the power pool it could produce. The load on the line to New England was coming down, but not quickly enough. Kennedy couldn’t figure out what was taking so long.
Jurith had a pretty good idea. Several of Con Ed’s steam units were either down for repairs or operating at less than full strength. But the real problem was the gas turbines. The remote controls were out of service, so the turbines had to be manually jump-started by the turbine boys, most of whom he’d already dismissed for the night. Jurith tried to call his boss, Con Ed’s chief system operator, Charles Durkin, at home in Westchester County, but couldn’t get through. He instructed his deputy to keep trying.
Two minutes later, at 8:56, two more lines on the mimic board flashed green. Both were connected to a different tower along the same northern corridor. Lightning had struck again. This time one line grounded the electrical charge and reclosed without incident. The other didn’t.
The line to New England picked up the additional load, and within a half second it had burned out. Con Ed was now left with a single feeder from the north, and it was way above its recommended load. The heat from the electrical currents was causing the line to expand and sag. If it dipped much lower, the cable would scrape the underbrush below. The contact would trip the circuit breakers, the circuit breakers would open the line, and the line would be rendered useless.
Con Ed had only three lines into the city, and it wasn’t generating enough in-city power to meet demand. It couldn’t get enough power from Long Island to make much of a difference, and the tie line connecting it to New Jersey was already so overloaded that the utility was threatening to open the line to protect its system. There was plenty of power available to the north—Ontario had three hundred megawatts ready to fly—but only one line to import it in on, Feeder 80.
Studying the big board, Kennedy could see no alternative. Con Ed was going to have to unplug some customers. He called Jurith.
“Bill, you better shed some load until you get down below this thing because I can’t pick up anything except from the north, see?” It was a command that Kennedy had never issued. In seven-plus years in the power pool control room, he’d heard it only once before, back in ’70 or ’71.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Jurith answered.
“Okay, fine,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy bought Jurith a little more time with New Jersey by calling the dispatcher there and telling him that Con Ed was facing a “major emergency.”
A few minutes later Con Ed’s in-city generators still weren’t producing enough power, the sole tie to the north was carrying an even bigger load, and Jurith still hadn’t unplugged anybody.
At 8:59 Kennedy called him again. This time he was a little more insistent: “Bill, I hate to bother you, but you better shed about 400 megawatts of load or you’re going to lose everything down there.”
“I’m trying to,” Jurith answered.
“You’re trying to?” Kennedy asked incredulously. “All you have to do is hit the button to shed it and then we’ll worry about it afterwards—but you got to do something …”
“Yeah, right,” Jurith answered. “Yeah, fine.”
Jurith still refused to activate the load-shedding panel. He may have resented the fact that Kennedy, who wasn’t really his boss, was telling him what to do. He may have been clinging desperately to the hope that those three last feeders could support the system long enough for another solution to emerge. Probably he just couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Jurith’s job was to keep people’s lights on, not to shut them off. “We got the impression that he was disintegrating,” recalls Carolyn Brancato, who directed the city’s investigation into the events of that night. “He was in breakdown mode.”
A couple of minutes later Jurith called Kennedy. He could see for himself, but he asked anyway: “Look any better?”
“No,” Kennedy answered.
The high-pitched alarm on Jurith’s desktop monitor had been whining for half an hour now. All three remaining feeders were exceeding their limits. The northern line, Feeder 80, was the most overtaxed. It was carrying fifteen hundred megawatts, 50 percent more than its short-term rating for extreme emergencies. Jurith knew he needed immediate relief. Never mind that losing Feeder 80 would send him right down the pipe—that those last two feeders would surely burn up from the additional load—he was going to open the line.
Jurith called the Westchester emergency supervisor. “I can’t hold it,” he said. “You’re gonna have to cut out 80 for me.”
“Feeder 80?” the Westchester supervisor asked in disbelief “You want that cut?”
Kennedy intervened just in time. “If you cut feeder 80 then you’re really going to be in trouble,” he told Jurith. Once again he urged Con Ed’s SO to shed load.
At 9:08, Jurith’s boss, Charles Durkin, called in. The power at his house in Yorktown Heights had already been knocked out, but he was studying a map of the Con Ed power grid, which he kept with him at all times, by kerosene lamp. “You got some problems, huh?” Durkin asked. It was a gross understatement.
Jurith didn’t notify Durkin that the power pool had been urging him to shed load for more than ten minutes. Instead, he told Durkin about his plans for Feeder 80. “Where’s the power going to go if you cut it out?” Durkin replied. “You can’t cut it out.”
While Jurith was on the phone with Durkin, Kennedy called again on the green phone, a special dedicated hotline for emergency use only. Jurith’s deputy, John Cockerham, answered.
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br /> “Tell Bill to go into voltage reduction immediately down there,” Kennedy said. Jurith wasn’t willing to shed load, so Kennedy hoped he might be less spooked by the idea of a voltage reduction. (Kennedy later testified that he was “getting desperate.”)
At 9:13, jurith finally moved his voltage reduction dials to 5 percent. The system load dipped by scarcely more than a hundred megawatts. Five minutes later he upgraded to an 8 percent reduction in voltage.
At 9:19, Feeder 80 drooped into a tree. Circuit breakers were tripped, and the line opened. Con Ed had lost its only connection to the north. The entire Westchester corridor was gone.
The two remaining lines—one to New Jersey, the other to Long Island—were hanging on somehow, but they couldn’t last much longer. Jurith was still on the phone with Durkin, so Kennedy spoke to Jurith’s deputy: “You got to shed load immediately or you’re going to go right down the pipe!”
“All right, pal,” Cockerham answered.
Durkin, who was without the benefit of a monitor, a mimic board, or overhead lights for that matter, was slowly coming around to the same conclusion. At 9:23 he told Jurith to do what Kennedy had been telling him for close to thirty minutes now: Start dropping load.
Con Ed’s tie to Long Island, a feeder between Queens and Nassau County, was overtaxed and about to burn out. Kennedy told the Long Island Lighting Company’s system operator to cut loose: “Go ahead, open it up, save your own system.” Con Ed was now down to one feeder, a transmission line from Staten Island to Linden, New Jersey.
Kennedy made his final call to the Con Ed control room at 9:27. Cockerham picked up. “I’m going to tell you one more time …” Kennedy began.
By now, Jurith had finally activated the load-shedding panel. Cockerham could see him standing over it turning dials and pressing buttons. “He’s doing it as fast as he can, pal,” Cockerham answered.
Kennedy checked the load on the Linden tie, Con Ed’s last lifeline to the outside world. It was still spiking. “All you got to do is punch a button to get rid of it,” he pleaded.
That’s what he is doing right now,” said Cockerham
No more than thirty megawatts were shed. Something had obviously gone wrong. In all likelihood, Jurith failed to operate the load-dumping equipment properly. One investigation found that he turned a master switch the wrong way. Another suggested that he didn’t lift the protective cover from the console before trying to depress the buttons.
At 9:27 the Linden tie opened. A few minutes later Long Island’s system operator asked Kennedy for an update on Con Ed. “It looks like he is all by himself right now,” Kennedy replied.
The Con Ed system was now officially islanded, cut off from all external power sources. It shifted much of its load to its biggest in-city generator, Big Allis, a thousand-megawatt steam unit in Queens. Like a circular saw fighting a losing battle with an oversize piece of wood, Big Allis’s turbines ground to a halt. Seconds later the generator automatically shut itself down. The city’s nine remaining generators buckled instantaneously under the increased load.
High in the sky over Queens, a cargo pilot watched the runaway vanish beneath him. He radioed the control tower: “Where’s Kennedy Airport?” He was instructed to head for Philadelphia.
Ten thousand traffic lights blinked off. Subway trains froze between stations. Elevators, water pumps, air conditioners—everything sputtered to a halt. All five boroughs and most of Westchester County were suddenly without power. Save for the flashing red aircraft beacons atop the Citibank building and the World Trade Center and the flame in the torch of the Statue of Liberty, it was a total urban eclipse.
29.
New York City is simply too big. I have lived in it for too long to hate it, but I know it too well to love it. I am still a part of it, yet I feel removed, like a broken jockey who grooms horses. I earn my living caring for it, but I feel helpless because I know that I can’t train it, or ride it, or make it win.
DENNIS SMITH, REPORT FROM ENGINE CO. 82 (1972)
OFFICER Wilton Sekzer, a broad, mustachioed man, about five feet ten, with jowly cheeks and rheumy hazel eyes, was in the living room of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, when the lights went out. On the way into the kitchen to check his fuse box, he peeked out the window. The whole block was dark. Sekzer ran up three flights and swung open the metal door to his roof. The whole neighborhood was dark. He looked to the west, across the East River, to Manhattan. The familiar shapes of the world’s most famous skyline all were blotted out by darkness. “Holy shit,” Sekzer muttered to himself. “There’s no lights on anywhere.” Minutes later he was in his car and heading for work.
Sekzer’s command, the Eighty-third Precinct in the bowels of Bushwick, Brooklyn, was exactly 5.3 miles away from the quiet, cheerful streets of Sunnyside. Driving through the blackness, the heavy air pushing through the open windows of his gold Chrysler Cordova, he remembered where he had been twelve years earlier, the last time New York was blacked out: the Mekong Delta, as a twenty-one-year-old helicopter door gunner. Now he was well into his thirties and married, with a boy of seven.
The Victorian-era station house of the Eighty-third Precinct was surrounded by buckling tenements and bodegas, its red- and yellow-brick façade buried beneath layers of grime. It was a beautiful building, though, one that recalled a distant era when constables patrolled New York’s neighborhoods on horseback The station house even bore its original City of Brooklyn seal. Turreted, with a corner tower and crenellated parapets, it looked almost like a medieval castle in miniature. Adjacent to it was a smaller building with big, rickety barn doors and a hayloft, the stable that once housed the police horses and now housed the commanding officer’s car. A few doors down, on the corner, was the B&G, a seedy bar where the cops of the Eight-Three would get drunk and swap stories.
Sekzer had been sent to the Eighty-third Precinct from Emergency Services in the summer of ’75, when the city’s fiscal crisis forced the Police Department to lay off five thousand officers. Sekzer had only narrowly escaped himself. The list of “indefinitely furloughed” officers had clanked over the teletype machine, after a cacophony of bells indicating that an urgent message from the commissioner was forthcoming. Sekzer’s captain proceeded to read all five thousand names in alphabetical order. The layoffs were based strictly on seniority. Most of Sekzer’s classmates from the academy were sacked, but he was saved by his eighteen months of military service, which were considered time on the job. He was reassigned, though, as were most cops working in specialty crime divisions like Emergency Services. Down five thousand men at a time of soaring crime, the city’s depleted precincts were going to need all the beat cops the department could muster.
Sekzer walked up the slate steps of the Eighty-third Precinct and checked in with the desk officer, who was still waiting for a call back from police headquarters about whether off-duty cops were going to be activated. Sekzer went down to the basement to the “lounge,” a couple of ratty sofas and a silent black-and-white TV set, to kill time. When he came back upstairs a few minutes later, the word had come down: All active officers were to report for duty. Sekzer was officially on the clock. The desk officer told him to stay loose; he might be going over to Manhattan to “protect the big money.”
A few minutes later the owner of a big furniture store in Bushwick burst through the station house doors in a rage. “What the fuck is going on? They’re looting my business on Broadway, and you motherfuckers are standing here?”
“The duty captain walks up right behind him,” Sekzer says. “This guy is screaming and screaming, and I don’t blame him. And the captain says, ‘All right, everybody in four-man cars. Go forth and do good.’”
The Eighty-third Precinct was not exactly a desirable assignment in 1977. The prior year it had confronted more criminal activity than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Many truck drivers insisted on police escorts when making deliveries in the neighborhood. Some store owners had taken to wearing firearms
on their hips. One block, Gates between Broadway and Bushwick, was so bad that two radio cars were required to respond to any call there. Three cops would enter the building in question while the remaining officer would stay behind to protect the squad cars.
One cop remembers being transferred from the Eight-Three into Manhattan in the 1980s. His new partner told him he had unholstered his gun six times in ten years. “Six times?” he replied, incredulous. “That was a good hour in Bushwick.”
In 1977 the Eight-Three was predominantly white. The neighborhood it policed was overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, with a narrow strip of Italians along its western edge. “Our job was about arresting minorities,” says one veteran of the Eight-Three. “That’s what it was about.”
About 130 officers called the Eighty-third Precinct home, meaning that at any given moment there were maybe 34 on duty, not nearly enough to police this crime-infested area of roughly 100,000 people. Working regular eight-hour shifts for five-day stretches was unheard of. There were simply too many people to arrest. “If you weren’t doing at least a hundred twenty-five hours of overtime a month, don’t you dare call yourself a collar man,” says Sekzer. “You are not a collar man.”
It didn’t help that the fiscal crisis had virtually eliminated Police Department support staff. It took anywhere from ten to fourteen hours for a cop to process a single perp. An officer first had to take his prisoner back to the precinct for fingerprinting, which had to be done by a detective. After filling out the arrest paperwork, he’d wait for a paddy wagon to take him and his prisoner to Brooklyn headquarters, where he’d give the fingerprints—and a buck for “expeditious service”—to another detective, who would hand them off to a clerk for processing. Mug shots were taken. Now it was off to the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. While the prisoner was locked up downstairs, the arresting officer was up on the second floor at a bank of manual typewriters, most of which were broken or missing keys. He’d type out the official complaint with the help of the New York State Penal Code booklet attached to the typewriter. Finally, he took his paperwork down to the lounge and waited for the arraignment.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Page 20
