It’s fondly called the Big Apple. It’s a part of the popular imagination about the great United States, one that hardly ever fails to impress. It’s been home to billionaires, dreamers, thinkers, philanthropists, actors, theatre veterans, and just about anyone who wishes to become one the great American dream.
For generations, it’s captured both- the dreamy-eyed and sky-rocketing ambition of film-makers, doers, believers, thinkers, and storytellers. And perhaps it makes perfect sense that despite being destroyed several times in the plot of key Hollywood makes- being attacked under the watch of both Batman, Spiderman, and even Godzilla, it stands back on its feet.
Nothing can suppress New York or dampen its charming quintessence- can it?
The home to the magnanimous Empire States building, the mega Freedom Tower and the great Statue of Liberty- New York- it could be said, just faced its biggest challenge of 2019. The massive blackout as experienced hours back by the New Yorkers was a bit of a sullen experience for the usually jovial and busy people.
But now, it all seems fine and normal routine life has resumed. But still, even as power has been restored after Saturday’s calamitous blackout here on Sunday, a question that’s bugging lakhs is that how it all happened?
It’s been reported that around 30 blocks from the famous Times Square all the way down to the Upper West side, the power outage affected as many as 72,000 New Yorkers- never an easy thing to deal with when much of our lives are reliant on power whether for urban transport, mobility, lodging, food preparation, and all aspects of work-life.
Let’s not forget that Saturday isn’t exactly an off day of the week for everyone.
But now utility company Con Edison has offered some insights behind the mess in New York city, stating the following:
“Over the next several days and weeks, our engineers and planners will carefully examine the data and equipment performance relating to this event, and will share our findings with regulators and the public,” the company said in a statement on Sunday.
That told, the city’s Mayor, Mr. Bill de Blasio had his own ideas as to why the sudden blackout engulfed the city. He said the outage was caused by a freak mechanical issue. Meanwhile, the utility company further added-
“We have to have a system that is designed to handle disruptions and rather than domino, we have a redundancy in this system so this doesn’t happen.”
That being told, it’s said that a blackout of such scale was last witnessed way back in 1977; do the math, that’s nearly four and a half decades back in the past.