“If it weren’t for electricity, we’d all be watching television by candlelight.” –George Gobel

I was aboard a Manhattan-bound Q rain on the evening of July 13 unaware New York City has suffered its worst power outage since 1977, which affected Manhattan’s midtown and Upper West Side. Upon reaching these areas, the subway halted operations momentarily.
After the train began moving after 30 minutes, I immediately transferred to an N train upon reaching Union Square (I typically transfer at Times Square). The train took me straight to the Queensboro Plaza station. That was when I learned about the five-hour power blackout that had hit the heart of “the city that never sleeps.”
Broadway shows were canceled, along with interrupting a Jennifer Lopez concert at Madison Square Garden.
In the Philippines, power interruptions are normal; in the United States, electricity is a matter of life and death—Americans probably couldn’t exist and survive without electricity.
New Yorkers in Midtown Manhattan were confused and inconvenienced. Some stranded commuters took cabs to get home.
Since it happened in “The Big Apple,” it’s a major event; it became headline news.
New York Governor Andrew Coumo also expressed outrage, calling the blackout, “unacceptable.”
“You just can’t have a power outage of this magnitude in this city,” he declared. “It is too dangerous; the potential for public safety risk and chaos is too high [and] we just can’t have a system that does that—it’s that simple.”
Meanwhile, 2020 presidential candidate, New York City mayor Bill De Blasio, who was chided by Cuomo for his absence during the incident (he was campaigning in Iowa at the time), said federal authorities confirmed, “There was no evidence whatsoever of any nefarious activity.”
Earlier, John McAvoy, CEO of utility firm Consolidated Edison (ConEd), assured power would be restored by midnight and, once a flash of lights came on, people in the streets cheered.
The ConEd official said the incident will be a subject of investigation and suggested the summer heat could have contributed to an overload of the local power grid. However, he told NBC News, “It does not appear related to excessive load.”
The outage disrupted life for thousands of New Yorkers with the city’s transit authority sending tweets noting multiple stations were not operational and were being bypassed.
The incident happened to occur on the anniversary of the 1977 blackout, which led to rioting and looting.
A senior city official with direct knowledge of the matter said it appeared the outage was caused by a transformer fire. The New York City Fire Department also reported they were at the scene of a transformer fire on West 64th Street.

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Alex P. Vidal, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo./WDJ