Thanks for the memory Mr. Mele. I was 34 years old, and attending a flashlight meeting of managers in The NY Times newsroom that night. I was in charge of the Classified Ad crew that was supposed to oversee the assembly of the next day's classified section. The decision had been made to print a small "news only" edition of The Times at the facilities of the Newark Star-Ledger, so I returned to the sixth floor, where, to the sound of windows being broken in Times Square, I forbade anyone from leaving the building. It was a long night.
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What might be worthwhile is to go back to the people who were on duty at One Police Plaza and in the middle of everything during the 1977 blackout (while they are still above ground) and see if anything they learned back then was applied successfully during this recent smaller one. The likelihood goes up every year that some bad actor is going to deliberately mess with our electrical grid and infrastructure, so anything that can be learned during inadvertent outages is likely invaluable because there aren't any dress rehearsals for these events.
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