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2012-11-06 10:20:53
Nov 2nd 2012, 18:19 by T.E. | NEW YORK
There have been five New York blackouts in my lifetime, which, if nothing else,
suggests that it is hardly an aberrant event. The one in 1965 was a little
spooky but exciting. In retrospect, it was a crack in the city that would widen
into the anarchy of the blackout in 1977, with its rampant looting and arson. A
disaster is good if, for nothing else, bringing into stark relief the
vulnerabilities of a community.
The World Trade Center attack in 2001 stands on its own, but two years later
was a better indication of how the city s ability to cope had been transformed
from the 1970s. There was palpable fear that the outage in 2003 was the result
of another attack, but the two most important public officials that year,
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, and Ray Kelly, the police chief, were calm and
credible and people calmly evacuated offices, often to walk many hours back
home.
The aftermath of Sandy, notwithstanding horrendous devastation and many
accidental deaths, has much in common with 2003, most notably a sense of
orderliness that has come to be expected, and is likely deeply appreciated only
by those who experienced prior panics. The same mayor and the same police chief
were very much in charge this time as well, ticking off lengthy lists of steps,
with dull and self-serving political statements only protruding when other
politicians managed to grab time before news cameras. Perhaps most surprising
has been the remarkable response by the city s often reviled mass transit
authority, which cobbled together numerous temporary methods, began an enormous
clean-up, and, through the mayor, provided constant updates.
Businesses were not surprisingly crushed by the power outages, but in Manhattan
there were also examples of joyful entrepreneurism in the areas that had been
most affected by the loss of power. The Old Homestead, a famous steakhouse in
Chelsea, set up charcoal barbecues outside its entrance. The smoke provided an
advertisement a half-mile away, drawing crowds. Electricity was out but gas
still flowed. At Ben s Pizzeria on MacDougal Street, customers sat in the dark
eating slices and, it seemed, the underlying paper plates as well. Just up the
street, a restaurant named La Lanterna di Vittoria trucked in a generator,
which made it (perhaps appropriately given its name) a light in a dark
neighbourhood, and during the day a popular charging station for laptops and
cell phones.
Numerous tiny markets and delicatessens cleared signs from their windows to
capture a bit of light and did a brisk business selling out of anything useful
on their shelves. Early on, it seemed that the lack of caffeine would transform
one of the world s most caffeinated populations into zombies, but coffee trucks
have begun showing up, and some clever store owners have brought in vast urns.
In the border area where power and phone connectivity begins to function,
Starbucks s wireless networks have become hugely popular. People congregate
outside the stores. Mobile phone-chargers are doing a brisk trade (see picture,
right).
The largest and most unintelligible failures have been with the public
utilities. Four days on, there is still no detailed explanation of what went
wrong at Con Ed, the local power utility, and its website has been devoid of
key local information. Mobile-phone companies have been far worse, in as much
as Con Ed is evidently hard at work doing repairs. Service by AT&T, America s
second-largest cell company, is pretty much non-existent in much, or all, of
lower Manhattan yet there is not a single piece of useful information on its
website about an emergency hotspot, or a timetable for repairs. Perhaps it felt
that acknowledging its failures on a company internet site would undermine its
ability to flog phones.
Service by Verizon, the other major component of what is essentially an
oligopoly, has been infinitely better it works but its response too has been
less than reassuring in a crisis, providing little information about obvious
problems. It delayed opening company stores in the immediate aftermath of the
storm. The almost indistinguishable units run by franchisees were quicker off
the mark, but that was a mixed blessing. A woman was stunned when she entered a
branch on Seventh Avenue, near Times Square, to be told that plugging in her
unit for a recharge would cost her $40. Anyone not paying was told to scram.
Why these companies should perform so much worse than the city or its
entrepreneurs is an open question. They are an essential public service, using
public airwaves that come with public responsibilities. Any impartial
post-storm reckoning should reveal these companies as a weak link. A skeptic s
explanation would be that these companies collect monthly fees regardless of
service, they do not face local voters, and the one entity that supervises
their conduct, the Federal Communications Commission, is in Washington,
insulated from the ravages, anger, and loss tied to the storm. If their failure
did not produce widespread tragedy, it is because in a disaster the most
important response is local, and this time around the locals did good.