1977 - When everyone but the looters stayed at home

New York lost its bustle yesterday as dead traffic lights, failed lifts and idle commuter trains deterred thousands of people from coming to work after the second great power failure in a dozen years.

They obeyed a warning to stay at home from Mayor Abraham Beame, who told a press conference as dawn broke over blacked-out streets: "We cannot tolerate, in this day and age, a system that can shut down the nation's largest city with a bolt of lightning in Rockland County."

At the height of the failure at least 10 million people had no electricity. At midday, 15 hours after the crisis began, almost half the city's consumers were still without it.

For most of the night it was a city of much sound, but little light. Police and fire sirens blared; burglar alarms shrieked until their batteries gave out. Portable radios crackled on street corners, and many of New York's population seemed to decide the best way to be understood was to shout a bit louder.

In Times Square youths roamed around, smashing windows and going into shops. Elsewhere, mannequins lay stripped on the floor as looters walked off with armfuls of clothes.

Police arrested about 2,000 people, six times as many as on an average night. Seventy-eight policemen were hurt.

The cause [of the blackout] was a lightning storm north of Manhattan. It hit transmission lines...about an hour later lightning struck a large transformer near a nuclear generating plant at Buchanan. The transformer exploded. Then another explosion apparently forced the nuclear plant to shut, increasing the load on other plants.