Lights go out in city that never sleeps

In Times Square, the crossroads of the world, all the neon and bright lights were impossibly dark.

Giovanni Leonardo stood in an enormous line, waiting for the bus above a tube station where no trains were running.

“It feels like September 11 all over again,” said Leonardo, 26, of Staten Island. “It’s that ’What’s going on?’ feeling.”

What was going on was plenty of nothing: no power, no air conditioning, no traffic lights, no trains after the power went out at 4.11pm (9.11pm Irish time) on a steamy August day. People were stranded in lifts or inside trains.

“Wherever the trains were when the electricity went out,” said a transit spokesman, “that’s where they are right now.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg quickly assured New Yorkers that terrorism was not involved – the first thought that occurred to Manhattan hair stylist Renato Vasconcelos.

“This is just too weird,” he said after giving six panicked customers a quick rinse.

Manhattan streets were flooded with pedestrians, most with no idea of how they might get home to the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, New Jersey or Connecticut. ”Westchester”, read a sign held by one woman standing near Governor George Pataki’s East Side office, headed for the suburbs.

In lower Manhattan, people wandered the streets in a scene far too reminiscent of the World Trade Centre attacks. At some intersections, pedestrians stood directing traffic.

Many businesses were forced to shut down early, their cash registers and lights rendered impotent by the massive outage.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, many folks were already walking across the East River on their way home, the same route they’d taken on September 11 or during a transit strike.

Pay phones saw lines a dozen deep as people struggled to call home when their mobile phones went out. At Patrick Conway’s, a bar near Grand Central Terminal, commuters hurriedly downed beers before the bottles turned warm as temperatures hovered in the 90s Fahrenheit (30s Celsius).

The bar’s owner, to the delight of his patrons, promised to stay open as long as the power from his generator held out.

Power went out in all five boroughs as well as the suburbs in the worst outage to strike the nation’s largest city since 1977, when electricity disappeared for 25 hours.

Wisconsin tourist Cathy Ley, 46, left her Times Square hotel to join thousands of others on the street.

“We wanted to come out where there was light,” she said. ”We want to see the lights tonight. We hope it doesn’t last too long.”

The city’s underground stations were plunged into darkness, with passengers waiting on platforms before heading upstairs for a bus. Buses were packed past capacity, and with good reason: they were among the only places in the city where the air conditioning was still blowing.

City hospitals, for the most part, were operating normally on generators. The Port Authority said all passengers had been safely evacuated from 10 trains that were stuck under the Hudson River or underground when the power went out.

At Kennedy International and LaGuardia Airports, all takeoffs were stopped but incoming flights were allowed to land. Both airports were working on backup power sources.