On July 13, 1977—40 years ago today—at approximately 9:36 p.m., New York City was plunged into darkness. Trains screeched to a halt, airports were shut down and baseball games were forced to postpone.
A lightning strike hit near Consolidated Edison’s Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant in Westchester County roughly 36 miles north of Manhattan, the New York Times reported the next day, setting off a destructive chain of events. Two other strikes from the same storm system overloaded substations and transmissions lines.
An hour later, the entire city's electrical system shut down.
Traffic was virtually non-existent, but hundreds of fires raged throughout the night, especially in Brooklyn where arson and looting were rampant.
A congressional study released a year later estimated the total damage at $300 million.
Luckily, news photographers and their analog cameras were still hard at work documenting the day. Here’s what the blackout looked like from the streets:
Manhattan's famous skyline became a silhouette when all five boroughs lost electricity around 9:30 pm on July 13, 1977
Commuters waiting on trains home were stranded at Grand Central Terminal after the power failure.
The station's famous opal-faced clock kept the correct time, but the larger one behind it is stuck on the time it lost power.
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