Power Failure of 1965
The Power Failure of 1965, also known as the Northeast Blackout, was a significant electrical outage that occurred on November 9, affecting a vast area of the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Triggered by a faulty circuit breaker, the blackout began when a relay at the Sir Adam Beck power plant in Canada mistakenly detected an overload, leading to a cascade of failures across the interconnected power grid. Within ten minutes, an extensive 80,000-square-mile area lost electricity, stranding over 600,000 subway passengers and causing widespread disruption in urban centers, including stalled elevators and non-functioning traffic lights.
The blackout revealed vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, as hospitals and airports grappled with the absence of power. Restoration efforts were complicated, taking up to thirteen hours in major cities like New York. In the aftermath, the Federal Power Commission initiated a comprehensive review to enhance the reliability of electric service, leading to recommendations for emergency preparedness, better interconnections between power plants, and improved training for control-room operators. This event underscored the need for a resilient power grid and prompted significant changes in how electricity is managed and distributed in North America.
Subject Terms
Power Failure of 1965
Date: November 9-10, 1965
The largest electric power failure in history. A small, local disturbance cascaded into a massive blackout that affected more than thirty million people in Canada and the northeastern United States.
Origins and History
A large interconnected network of power plants and high-voltage transmission lines provides electricity to the northeastern United States and Canada. On November 9, 1965, a faulty circuit breaker triggered a sequence of events that brought the whole system to a halt within ten minutes.
The Blackout
Four hundred miles north of New York, the Sir Adam Beck power plant was supplying electricity to the Toronto area. A defective relay sensed an overload in one of five transmission lines and opened a switch to shut down that line. The power was automatically diverted to the other four lines, which then became overloaded and shut down. Immediately, the lights went out in Toronto.
All the power that had been flowing toward Canada suddenly was rerouted south into the U.S. network. This power surge caused automatic safety devices to shut down the main transmission line from Niagara Falls to New York City. Generators in the New England system automatically cut off from the network to protect them from damage. Within minutes, an eighty-thousand-square-mile area was left without electricity.
When the power went off at 5:15 p.m. during rush hour, more than six hundred thousand people were stranded in subway trains. Passengers had to be evacuated along unlighted tunnels. Skyscrapers lost power, and thousands of elevators came to a stop, leaving people trapped between floors. Automobile traffic became snarled when stop lights ceased to function, and many commuters were stranded in the darkened cities of the Northeast.
Hospitals and airports discovered their vulnerability to a power failure. Babies were delivered and operations had to be completed by candlelight. Lights went out at airport runways, and air-traffic controllers lost contact with incoming planes. Major accidents fortunately were avoided by establishing telephone communication with alternate airports to divert planes from the blackout region.
It took more than four hours to restore power in Boston and thirteen hours in New York City because auxiliary power was not available. Fortunately, one small plant on Staten Island was still running. It was used to restart a second plant and to restore power to its immediate area. Other plants were brought back into service one by one. Not until the next morning was the power grid back to normal.
Impact
The power failure created widespread anxiety that an act of sabotage, terrorism, or simple vandalism could immobilize a whole region of the country. In the aftermath of the Northeast blackout of 1965, the Federal Power Commission (FPC) convened a panel of experts to study how the reliability of electric service could be improved. Their report contained an extensive list of recommendations, many of which were adopted.
To deal with unexpected power outages, the FPC determined that airports and hospitals should install emergency generators and recommended that public buildings provide emergency lighting in stairwells and elevators. It urged that backup battery power be available for communications equipment and suggested that coal-burning power plants ready a source of auxiliary power.
The FPC recommended that a better balance be developed between the number of power plants and the network of transmission lines. In 1965, the Northeast had ample generating capacity but not enough interconnecting lines, so the power that was available could not be rerouted along alternate pathways. The commission advocated the increased use of computers for rapid on-line analysis and control and better emergency training of control-room operators.
Additional Information
The November 19, 1965, issue of Life magazine contains Theodore H. White’s “What Went Wrong? Something Called 345 KV,” an excellent article on the power failure, as well as many photographs.