Sandy

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.