Revenge of the Power Grid
Infrastructure is everything you don’t think about. The roads you drive on. The rigs and refineries that turn fossil fuel into the gas that makes your car go. The electricity that powers the streetlights and lamps that guide your way. All these technologies vanish into the oblivion of normalcy.
Until they break. Then everyone notices.
That’s what happened Saturday night in New York City when a power outage struck Midtown Manhattan, from Hell’s Kitchen north to Lincoln Center and from Fifth Avenue west to the Hudson River. The blackout darkened the huge, electric billboards of Times Square, forced Broadway shows to cancel performances, and even disabled some subway lines.
According to , the outage was caused by a transformer fire within the affected region. Power was fully restored by early the following morning. It was not the first or the most severe blackout to hit the Big Apple—another took out the whole in 1977, and yet another struck in the summer of 2003. The causes vary—a series of lightning strikes instigated the 1977 event, and a remote software error caused the one in 2003. But deferred maintenance, increased demand, climate-change-driven weather calamities, and even the threat of cyberattack put infrastructure at greater risk.
