The right dates
There was no great New York City blackout in 1967. The famous one took place on 9 November 1965, in the early evening, and it affected much of the northeastern United States and part of Ontario as well as New York. The later blackout that most New Yorkers remember, and that people sometimes confuse with the earlier one, struck on 13-14 July 1977. They were very different events. In 1965 the city was widely praised for its calm; in 1977 there was extensive looting and arson. Nothing comparable happened in 1967.
The Northeast blackout of 1965
The Northeast blackout of 1965 began a little after 5:15 in the evening, at the height of the rush hour on a Tuesday. The origin was a protective relay at a generating station on the Canadian side of the Niagara region, the Sir Adam Beck station in Ontario. The relay had been set to trip at a level of current lower than the line was normally expected to carry. When a modest surge in demand arrived, the relay tripped and the power it had been carrying spilled onto other lines, which in turn were overloaded and shut down.
That sequence, in which one failure shifts load onto neighbouring parts of the system and causes further failures, is called a cascade failure. Within minutes the effect had spread through the interconnected grid of New York, New England and Ontario. Roughly 30 million people were reported to be affected across an area of about 80,000 square miles. In New York City the lights went out at around 5:27 pm and stayed off for many hours; in parts of the region, service came back sooner.
A calm city
The events of the night entered New York folklore, in part because they were so orderly. Commuters were stuck in subway trains, some of them for hours, and thousands walked home across bridges. Volunteers directed traffic at dark intersections. Restaurants and bars served food that would otherwise spoil by candlelight, and strangers shared rides. The night sky was unusually clear, and many people remembered seeing the stars over Manhattan.
Reports of crime that night were low, though reporters at the time and later writers have also pointed out that some of the stories of warmth and calm were repeated until they became tidier than the reality. A widely repeated claim that there was a surge in births nine months later was examined by researchers and not supported by the data, and should not be treated as fact.
Consequences for the grid
The blackout prompted a broad review of electric reliability in North America. In the following years the utility industry created the North American Electric Reliability Council, in 1968, to set shared standards and coordinate planning. Utilities introduced more automatic protection and better communication between control rooms. The 1965 failure became a standard case study in power engineering, and it affected how regional interconnections were designed.
July 1977: a different outcome
The New York blackout of 13-14 July 1977 began on a hot summer evening when lightning strikes damaged transmission equipment and a chain of equipment and operating problems left most of the city without power. It lasted around a full day in many neighbourhoods.
The city was in a very different condition from 1965. It was in the middle of a fiscal crisis, with cut services and high unemployment, and police numbers had been reduced. Looting and arson broke out in a number of low-income neighbourhoods, including parts of the South Bronx, Bushwick and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and Harlem. More than 3,000 people were reported arrested, hundreds of police officers were injured, and many stores were damaged or destroyed. The damage left a deep mark on the city’s image for years afterwards.
Historians have offered competing explanations for the difference between the two nights. Some focus on the hot weather, the economic hardship of the 1970s and the decline of some neighbourhoods; others stress that the 1977 blackout began at night, which gave looters cover, whereas the 1965 outage began at dusk on a cool November day when many people were commuting. Few agree on a single cause.
What this has to do with 1967
The confusion with 1967 probably arises from the fact that 1967 was the peak of the long hot summer in other American cities, with the Newark riot and the Detroit riot of 1967 making national news, and the vocabulary of crisis from 1965 and 1977 gets attached to it. New York did not have a major riot in 1967; the sharp contrast between 1965 and 1977 is a reminder that how a city behaves in an emergency depends on timing, conditions and leadership.
A final note on later events: another large blackout hit the Northeast and Midwest on 14 August 2003, and New York again came through largely without the disorder of 1977.