Word: northeasters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...balmy evening last week, a young man was flying his box kite in a posh residential neighborhood to the northeast of Santa Barbara, Calif. Suddenly the kite swooped into power lines, causing a short circuit that showered sparks and ignited the drought-dried chaparral below. Whipped by winds of up to 40 m.p.h., the blaze roared down the hills on a one-mile front toward the coastal city (pop. 73,000). Said one awed witness: "Homes went up with a huge whoosh and puff. Palm trees exploded like Roman candles...
...could a power system that many people thought was made fail-safe after the Northeast's great 1965 blackout plunge New York City into helpless darkness once again? It may take months of investigation to get the complete answer. But at week's end, an outline of the falling-domino sequence of failures that led to the total collapse had begun to emerge...
...Northeast appears to have more than enough reserve electrical capacity, but there is a power squeeze in parts of the rapidly growing Sunbelt. In South Texas, for example, the requirement that utilities convert the fuel for their generators from natural gas to coal-at the same time that industry is converting from gas to electricity-often forces Houston Lighting & Power to buy power from other companies. Completion of two large nuclear power plants in Texas in the early 1980s is expected to ease the squeeze...
After New York's big blackout last week-in many respects a replay of the 1965 power shutdown that darkened eight states in the Northeast-that old Con Ed catharsis began working overtime. Federal, state and local agencies launched investigations of the power failure. Politicians and editorial writers howled over the fact that only three days before the city went dark, Con Ed's $200,000-a-year chairman had said he could "guarantee" that the chances of another blackout were remote. New York Mayor Abraham Beame summarily convicted Con Ed's management of "gross negligence...
Hailing themselves as "the silent majority," the demonstrators included blue-collar workers-utility employees, electricians, plumbers-and their families from throughout the Northeast. Some had spent up to twelve hours in chartered buses to attend the rally. They were greeted by New Hampshire's Governor Meldrim Thomson Jr., who called them "beautiful" compared with "what I saw the first of May." The protest, organized by a pro-Seabrook group named the New Hampshire Voice of Energy, may be only the first in behalf of the facility. Vowed Daniel Tenchara, a 41-year-old pipefitter from Westport, Mass...