Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  At that point, he was studying behavioural science and sociology at New York University, having taken a leave of absence from IBM’s department of equal opportunity. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1977 and continued his studies on a post-doctoral fellowship. Then he joined the National Institute on Drug Abuse as researcher and speech writer.

  He was in no sense a typical Falls daredevil. Yet in 1988 he announced he would again go over in a barrel, not for money or personal gain, but to throw the spotlight of publicity on the U.S. government’s treatment of minorities and women. “I hurt in every part of my mind, heart and body,” Fitzgerald told a press conference. “There is no hurt like a crushing sense of injustice. It is unbearable and debilitating. It becomes the most controlling force in your life.” He claimed a white superior would not allow him, a black man, to be given credit for some sociological research he had done on blood pressure. “My losses have been truly staggering. I have lost my dream, my health, and even may have lost my chance to relieve the suffering of humanity.… I intend to make a second plunge over the Falls to protest the U.S. Government’s treatment … of whistle blowers who ethically resist corruption.”

  He never did it. “I’m trying to talk him out of it,” his wife said, “but he’s a very determined person.” Apparently she succeeded, for Dr. William Fitzgerald, a.k.a. Nathan Boya, the diffident daredevil – like Annie Taylor and Jean Lussier before him – never made good on his promise to tempt the cataract a second time. Nor has he ever explained his reasons for doing it at all.

  2

  Blackout

  Four years after William Fitzgerald’s plunge, eighty thousand square miles of northeastern North America were suddenly blacked out by the worst power failure in the continent’s history. The trouble was traced to a small fail-safe device, no larger than a pay telephone, in the Sir Adam Beck Generating Plant No. 2 at Niagara Falls. At eleven seconds after 5:16 p.m. on November 9, 1965, at the worst possible hour, when most people were heading home from work and housewives were cooking dinner on their electric stoves, the device automatically triggered the catastrophe.

  Exactly thirty seconds later, in the Robert Moses generating station across the river, operators sensed trouble. The familiar hum of the big generators became a series of eerie, off-key whines as they suddenly changed pitch. Synchronized to produce power at 120 revolutions a minute, they now began to spin at varying speeds. The dials that showed the amount of power the plant was producing went wild. The automatic governors that set the speed of the generators sprang into action, but these were soon fighting each other – one slowing down to compensate for the loss in demand for power, another speeding up as its automatic equipment sensed an increasing demand for its own power production. The needle that indicated the flow of power came right off the paper, producing “more squiggly lines than in an earthquake.” The power zoomed suddenly from 1,500 megavolts to 2,250, then dropped back to zero.

  Herbert Hubbard, the chief project operator, took three men with him and raced downstairs to begin manual operation of the generators, resynchronizing them by hand individually and bringing them back to proper speed. By 5:45 they were operating normally, but at 6:30 they went out of step once more. Again, it took manual operation to calm them down.

  By then the entire northeast power grid was in disarray. In just twelve minutes, thirty million bewildered people in eight states were plunged into blackness; most of Ontario was also affected. Dale Chapman, a United Airlines pilot, was flying at 30,000 feet and looked down at the bright lights of New York City; suddenly he found that the entire city was missing. To him, it looked like the end of the world. Another pilot, Reinhard Noethel, flying a Boeing 707 at 39,000 feet, told his passengers that if they looked out of the windows on the left side they’d see Boston – and then gasped: Boston was gone.

  In Niagara Falls, where it all started, power was restored by seven that evening, partly because of the large number of producing stations in the area and partly because of prompt action by the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, which quickly cut back power to its industrial customers.

  Toronto, with its 670 electric streetcars and 130 electric trolley buses, blacked out for an hour and twenty minutes at the height of the rush hour. Nineteen minutes later, at 6:54 p.m., it blacked out again. Power was restored at 7:12, but a third outage came at 7:22. Surface lines did not begin running again until 8:32. The subways – with 12,000 passengers aboard – were out until nine o’clock. The result was chaos. Traffic lights stopped working, and in the words of one witness, “the pedestrians went wild, like cattle let out of a pen.” At least two men left stalled streetcars to act as emergency traffic policemen. Apartment dwellers couldn’t get their cars into garages that operated with electric doors; others couldn’t use elevators or even some stairs because these were intended as fire escapes and were reached by doors opened only from the inside.

  But Toronto’s problems paled beside those of New York City, which was out of power for almost fourteen hours, partly because Consolidated Edison did not move quickly enough to cut itself off from the interconnected systems. The blackout began at 5:27 p.m. Service was not restored until dawn.

  Ten thousand of New York’s subway passengers were trapped for seven hours; 800,000 were stranded in electric commuter trains. Two trains ground to a stop in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge, suspended high above the East River. Mary Doyle, an eighteen-year-old commuter, would always remember the sensation, rather like riding on a Ferris wheel: “The wind would blow and the train would sway and some people would scream.” With the help of the police, she and the others made their way gingerly across an eleven-inch catwalk leading from the tracks to the bridge’s roadway below. This precarious manoeuvre occupied five hours.

  Firemen were forced to break through walls in the three tallest skyscrapers – the Empire State, Pan American, and RCA buildings – to release scores of people trapped in elevators. Thirteen strangers squeezed into an elevator on the twenty-first floor of the Empire State Building grew to know each other so well that they organized a Blackout Club that met regularly long after the incident was over. Stranded on the thirty-second floor of another building, a lawyer turned and said to his fellow passengers, “Thank God we’ve got some whiskey.” When the whiskey was gone, they held seances to understand their spiritual selves. Four people found themselves trapped for twenty hours in the RCA Building. One turned out to be a yoga expert. To fight off boredom, he gave the others lessons in various positions, even demonstrating by standing on his head.

  Five hundred aircraft had to be diverted from New York City. One thousand overseas passengers found their transatlantic flights cancelled. Some three million cheques could not be cleared at the Federal Reserve Bank. Television went off the air and only transistor and car radios worked. The New York Times was the only paper able to publish, thanks to a printing plant across the Hudson in that part of New Jersey unaffected by the power failure.

  Yet people groping their way along the dark streets or stranded in the bars and cafés, sleeping on couches and carpets in hotels, remained remarkably cheerful. Fifteen people sang Calypso songs aboard one stranded train and danced in the aisles. Crime, astonishingly, took a holiday. Civil defence was alerted and the National Guard called out, yet there were only a quarter of the arrests made on a normal night. Only two people died as a result of the power failure, one from a heart attack after climbing ten flights of stairs, the other from a fall in the dark. One family’s apartment was gutted by a fire caused by emergency candles.

  People who had taken the genie of electricity for granted all their lives now came to realize they had become its slaves. The experience of the family of Edwin Robins, a mechanical engineer in Queens, was typical of that of thousands of gadget lovers who suddenly found that nothing worked. In the Robins house it wasn’t only the lights that went off. The heat went off because the oil furnace was triggered by electricity. The refrigerator stopped running. The stove wouldn’t work. The house wa
s a machine that had run out of power. The intercom system didn’t work, nor did the multitone door chimes. The Danish dining-room chandelier didn’t work. The bedroom clocks didn’t work. The hair dryer, the electric blankets, the can opener, the toothbrush, and the razor were all unusable. Even the electric-eye garage door was out of business. The Robins family, who had learned to Live Better Electrically, in the enthusiastic advertising phrase of the day, now found themselves reduced to searing steaks over an outdoor barbecue.

  Charcoal fires and guttering candles – the stuff of the Middle Ages – were no longer trendy; they were essential. Harriette Browne, a Manhattan housewife, was forced to use the candles intended for her husband’s birthday cake to light the house. People stormed into Ajello’s candle shop and snapped up fancy bayberry candles at $7.50 a pair. The New York Hilton Hotel alone used up thirty thousand candles that night.

  Nobody yet knew how it had started, and that included the experts. One small boy in New Haven was certain that it was his fault. He whacked a telephone pole with a stick and every light in town went out. He rushed home, weeping, to his mother. A Manhattan housewife who had just finished trimming the ends of some electrical wires, preparing for the painter, experienced a moment of shock when the blackout struck. “What have I done now?” she blurted. Some thought the power system had been sabotaged, probably by the Russians; others thought the Pentagon, experimenting with new weaponry, was to blame.

  It took a week to pinpoint the cause of the trouble at Beck 2 and another month for a commission of inquiry to sort out all the details. Ironically, it was the very obsession with safety that helped trigger the blackout – that, and the rapidly increasing hunger for electrical power in North America.

  The northeast power grid, known as the CANUSE system (for Canadian and United States Energy), covered much of Ontario and most of the northeastern United States. It represented a pool of power provided by a loose confederation of forty-two power companies on both sides of the border. Most of this power came from Niagara Falls through the two Beck plants at Queenston and the Robert Moses plant across the river. Combined, they represented the largest generating capacity in one location in North America.

  This pooling of resources – the purchase and exchange of power – not only avoided costly duplication but was also efficient, cheap, and reliable. It allowed the transfer of power almost instantaneously to any area that suddenly ran short. The northeast grid was connected to other grids on the continent, so that a housewife in Hamilton, Ontario, plugging in an electric frying pan, might be using power shared by a company in Kansas.

  There was, however, a risk. A massive breakdown in one part of the system could create excessive strain and automatically set off a chain reaction throughout the network. Automation had its disadvantages; it required intervention by a human to cut a local system out of the power grid. No fewer than eight buttons at the Consolidated Edison control centre in New York had to be pushed to isolate the city from the rest of the power pool. In the late afternoon of November 9, that had been done too late.

  An electrical superhighway of five transmission lines connected Beck 2 with Toronto. On the day of the blackout each of the five was loaded almost to its capacity of 375 megawatts. There was a protective system in operation. If a line became overloaded, a series of circuit breakers, similar to those in an ordinary household, would go into operation and cut off the power. For extra safety, there were backup relays in case a circuit breaker failed to work. Thus there were two sets of failsafe devices standing by to protect the lines going out of Beck 2.

  The defect in the system was that Ontario Hydro had not taken into account the increasing demand for power. The relays were set too low. The backup relay that triggered the blackout had been set in 1963 to operate if the line carried more than 375 megawatts of power. The load the line carried was then much less than the maximum. Now, two years later, although the demand had increased, the relays had not been reset.

  Power consumption was building up to its winter peak. The weather was getting colder, and one big steam plant in Ontario was out of operation. The load on the lines to Toronto became heavier. The average flow out of Niagara to Toronto reached 365 megawatts that afternoon, dangerously close to the maximum that had been set in 1963. The flows, however, were not constant; they fluctuated from second to second. On November 9, the flow on one line momentarily exceeded the 375 megawatt maximum, and the fail-safe system automatically disconnected the line.

  The remaining lines were already close to being overloaded. When the flow on the disconnected line was transferred to the four still operating out of Beck 2, each became loaded beyond the level at which its protective relay was set to operate. They tripped out successively over a two-and-a-half-second period. With these five major lines disconnected, the Beck 2 generator at Niagara was separated from the rest of the network in Ontario. The Moses plant, too, had been sending power to Toronto, and now this power, together with all the power being generated by Beck 2 – a total of 1.5 million kilowatts – had nowhere to go. It reversed itself, cascaded across the Niagara gorge, and was automatically redirected to other lines in the grid leading south and east. This huge surge of power was more than the lines could carry. It knocked out system after system, as one Hydro account put it, “like box cars piling up after an engine jumps the tracks.”

  An instantaneous drop in power generation at the big Niagara plants was followed by a rapid buildup that threw the generators out of phase. That caused the breakdown of the New York State transmission system. In effect, the grid had ceased to operate as a pool and was cut into sections. Within minutes, even seconds, the domino effect had forced other hydro plants as well as steam plants to shut down.

  In New York City the following morning, weary transit workers walked every foot of the 720-mile subway system to make sure that no one had fallen on the tracks or been incapacitated by injuries. For many New Yorkers, walking was a new experience. Some had trudged thirty blocks or more to get home the night before or descended an equal number of flights of stairs to escape the darkened skyscrapers.

  For the first time many people began to realize the extent of the electrical revolution. It was only sixty-nine years since Niagara Falls power had begun to propel the Buffalo streetcars. Since that day, every house had become an electrical machine, and when the power went off, the machine ran down; as the Robins family discovered, everything from TV sets to food mixers stopped functioning.

  In spite of the $100-million damage bill for business, the great blackout was no more than a minor glitch in a world attuned to and dazzled by scientific progress. Its chief legacy, and a sobering one, was its demonstration, in the most graphic manner possible, of the utter vulnerability of the modern urban human animal.

  3

  Drying up the Falls

  By the early sixties, the mayor of Niagara Falls, New York, had become seriously concerned about the condition of the American cataract. His city was losing tourists to the Canadian side because not only were the Horseshoe Falls more spectacular but they had also undergone a series of improvements that made them more accessible for viewing.

  In 1954, an international control structure had been built out from the Canadian shore one mile above the Horseshoe to replace an earlier underwater weir. Its chief purpose was to hold back the flow of the river so that enough water could be diverted into the upstream tunnels on both sides to feed the Beck and Moses generating stations. But it also controlled the crest of the Horseshoe, allowing the water to spread out to an evener and more picturesque line than in the past.

  The following year a great deal of remedial work had been undertaken on both flanks of the Horseshoe by U.S. and Canadian engineers. The riverbed below the old site of Table Rock was cleared of debris and filled in to provide better space for viewing the great Falls. Directly opposite, on the eastern flank of the Horseshoe, an area at Terrapin Point had been drained and back-filled to create another large viewing space.

  While the
enhanced Horseshoe Falls became an even greater attraction, the smaller cataract on the American side was further diminished by nature itself. Since the big rock slide of 1931, a series of lesser slides had dumped tens of thousands of tons of talus below the American Falls as the cataract continued its slow but relentless movement upriver. The rocks that tumbled from the Horseshoe, producing its notch-shape, dropped into the 200-foot-deep plunge pool below and vanished. But the smaller cataract did not have the force required to remove the talus or the depth of water below to hide it.

  The greatest rock fall of all, in 1954, had virtually obliterated Prospect Point and also torn a wedge-shaped section out of the cataract. Prospect Point had lost its glamour, and the view of the Horseshoe from Terrapin Point had been diminished, too. By equalizing the outflow of water over the Horseshoe’s crest, the engineers had reduced the amount gushing over the flanks, especially on the American side near the site of the old Terrapin Tower.

  The original Cave of the Winds, where tourists in waterproof clothing had ventured behind the sheet of the Luna Falls, was no more. With constant erosion threatening another disaster, the famous site had been blasted away. The name remained, and visitors continued to go down by the elevator that led to the base of the Luna, or Bridal Veil, Falls. There they threaded their way along the catwalks, drenched by a furious blast of spray. It was still an exciting adventure, but not as thrilling as it had once been.

  The worst problem was the talus, a mountain of debris growing higher with every rock-fall and blocking off the view of the American cataract. Everything from baseball-sized stones to huge boulders the size of a house lay in heaps outward for fifty feet from the precipice over which the water flowed.