The Grid and the Village: Losing Electricity, Finding Community, Surviving Disaster

225 Pages·1.432 MB·English

by  Stephen Doheny-Farina

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The Grid and the Village
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The Grid and the Village Stephen Doheny-Farina
losing electricity, finding community, surviving disaster
Yale University Press New Haven and London
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for the volunteers
Copyright © 2001 by Yale University. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
All rights reserved. Data
Doheny-Farina, Stephen.
Photo credits:National Weather Service His-
The grid and the village : losing electricity,
torical Photo Collection, National Oceanic
finding community, surviving disaster /
and Atmospheric Administration, Department
Stephen Doheny-Farina.
of Commerce (pp. xiv, 114); New York
p. cm.
State Emergency Management Office, photo
Includes bibliographical references and
by Dennis Michalski (pp. 24, 156); FEMA
index.
News Photo, Federal Emergency Manage-
ISBN 0-300-08977-5 (alk. paper)
ment Agency, photo by New York State Elec-
1. Electric power distribution—New York
tric and Gas (pp. 56, 188); FEMA News
(State)—Cold weather conditions. 2. Elec-
Photo, Federal Emergency Management
tric power failures—New York (State)—Pots-
Agency, photo by Sandra Thornton (pp. 86,
dam Region—Social aspects—Case studies.
196).
3. Ice storms—New York (State)—Saint
This book may not be reproduced, in whole Lawrence County—History. 4. Potsdam Re-
or in part, including illustrations, in any form gion (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections century. I. Title.
107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and TK3091.D56 2001
except by reviewers for the public press), 363.34'92—dc21 2001000355
without written permission from the
publishers. A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Designed by Sonia Shannon. The paper in this book meets the guidelines
Set in Bembo and Futura types by dix! for permanence and durability of the Commit-
Syracuse, New York. tee on Production Guidelines for Book
Printed in the United States of America by Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
R. R. Donnelley & Sons, Harrisonburg,
Virginia. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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contents
preface trading tales vii
one from accidents to disaster 1
two origins of a grid, part 1 25
three the grid crumbles 57
four origins of a grid, part 2 87
five the grid rebuilt 115
six the grid and the village 157
afterword a disaster timeline 189
notes 197
index 207
v
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preface trading tales
Y
ou know,I lived through a tornado once.”
“Really?”
“Yes sir.Downstate.I also saw a big flood up close
when I was a trooper in Corning.It must have been
the early seventies sometime.Hurricane Agnes.”
“Hey, me too. In Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna
flooded.”
So began a conversation one cold January evening in
1998;my neighbor Lynn Warden and I were trading disaster
stories.We didn’t finish the conversation that night because we
were in the midst of another disaster. He and I were busy
working with our families and friends to keep our households
functioning during a massive ice storm that had descended
upon New York, New England, and eastern Canada. The
storm had arrived with little warning,crushing power grids
from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic.It isolated towns,
villages,suburbs,neighborhoods,and cities,forced thousands
of people into public shelters,and left the remaining several
million to struggle in their homes without electricity during
the coldest time of the year.
The storm hit particularly hard where I live. And some
weeks later,as my family and neighbors began to emerge from
vii
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preface viii
the ordeal, I felt a tremendous need to gain some under-
standing of those events beyond my own limited perspective.
So I began investigating. I interviewed other participants as
soon as their lives returned to some semblance of normality.
What did they see? How did they cope? I tried to learn more
about the power grid:how it was built,how it worked,and why
it failed so severely.I also started to examine the way the disas-
ter had been portrayed in a variety of local and national media.
I collected newspaper and magazine accounts.I searched the
Web for a variety of online reports about the storm.I tracked
down transcripts of television news reports and purchased sev-
eral “ice storm videos”produced by regional television stations
and sold as “commemorative edition”keepsakes.
I found the latter items particularly fascinating because
they let me reexperience the disaster as I typically experience
such events:through television.For hundreds of thousands of
us living in the disaster region,television was out for weeks.
These videos filled in a lot of the blanks for us.They showed us
the storm’s impact beyond our neighborhoods or towns.That
was interesting,of course,but what I found most compelling
was a segment in one video that showed the first moments as a
local television station returned to the air under generator
power.It was a live nighttime report from a darkened town
broadcast just as power was restored to a major substation.The
on-location reporter was lit only by car headlights.Then the
camera panned across the blackness to security lights blazing
for the first time at the drive-up window of a local bank.But
something was wrong. The camera turned back toward the
substation and focused on flames at the top of a power pole.
The reporter was trying to describe what she was seeing when
all of a sudden something exploded and everything was black
again—save the car headlights,the cascading sparks,and the
burning pole.
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preface ix
Many of us up here may have seen such things happen
right outside our own homes.But for me,seeing it through the
lens of a television camera some months after the storm,the
scene conjured up a mix of trauma,excitement,and a strange
sense of comfort: it’s happening now on the screen and no
longer in my front yard.
This book is another screen,another lens trained on those
events.It tells stories about two villages separated by time,con-
nected by proximity,and united by the challenges of maintain-
ing a community under duress.
The story of one village presents an insider’s view of a nat-
ural disaster,describing the destruction of the electric grid in
January 1998 and the emergence of a community that filled
the resulting void.This story begins with moments in the lives
of people in the village of Potsdam,New York—people such
as myself,my family,my neighbors,townspeople,local officials,
and relief workers—and expands to cover the breadth of the
disaster. The book concludes with a timeline of events that
traces the disaster from the storm’s origins in the Gulf of Mex-
ico to the lethal flooding it caused as it moved slowly up the
eastern seaboard to the icy devastation it brought to the
Northeast.
The story of the other village begins nearly two hundred
years before the ice storm in a place called Louisville Landing,
about twenty miles from Potsdam on the border between the
United States and Canada.This narrative provides a glimpse of
what it took to build the kind of grids that made this nation,
the grids that connect us to one another.It is told through the
experiences of some of the people who sacrificed the most to
build them.
Taken as a whole,these stories become a vehicle by which
I examine the relationships between electronic and human
connections,between networks and neighborhoods,between