NYC Suffers a Wee Blackout

NEW YORK | The blackout was brief, darkening a large swath of Manhattan and the Bronx for less than an hour. But it came on a sweltering day and left some wondering if it wasn't a sign of trouble to come.

The outage Wednesday knocked out traffic lights, snarled subway service and forced the evacuation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one of the hottest days of the year.

"It was chaos," said motorist Edward Ankudavich, who spent an hour traveling 20 blocks in the Bronx.

The blackout, which started at 3:42 p.m. and lasted about an hour, affected approximately 385,000 people, Consolidated Edison Chief Executive Kevin Burke said at a news conference. It started in a Queens substation connected to two others in the Bronx and Manhattan's Upper East Side, he said.

Burke said the cause was under investigation but that it wasn't likely caused by increased power usage. He said it was unlikely to happen again.

The city was experiencing the second day of temperatures hovering around 90 degrees. Visitors to the Met had to sit on the outside steps in the heat. Traffic lights in affected areas also went down, causing heavy gridlock. Lights went out around Yankee Stadium, and subway and train service was disrupted all around New York, which consumes more power on a hot summer day than the entire nation of Chile.

The blackout caused subway and commuter train suspensions and delays, officials said.

For some, the outage hearkened back to blackouts last year and in 2003 and left some wondering if more outages were likely.

"It doesn't bode well for the rest of the summer, but I'm impressed they got it back on so fast," said Nancy Marcus, a manager at an optician's store on the Upper East Side.