As I watched FDNY firefighters battling the blaze, my mind drifted to Eric. Wondering if there would ever be a time when I’d see a firefighter or pass by a fire truck and I wouldn’t think of him. Miss him. But I had to keep moving.
About a half mile from the ANC studios, I interviewed a woman and her daughter who had just been trapped alone in an elevator on the thirty-ninth floor for nearly an hour.
“We had no cell phone. No water. And it was so hot in there. Only thing I had was TUMS. We started to panic because no one answered the emergency alarm. And my daughter’s in a wheelchair. Seemed like forever before the generators kicked in and a maintenance worker helped us out.”
Although cell phones didn’t work, many people shared information they’d heard on car radios or TVs operating on backup generators. LaGuardia Airport had shut down, with flights rerouted to nearby airports. Subway service was disrupted, and thousands were trapped in tunnels throughout the city. Aliens and terrorists were ruled out. An explosion at a generator in Queens was the likely culprit.
Thousands of people were gathered in the streets, escaping the stifling heat of their apartment buildings. Some were laughing and drinking as though it were some kind of late-night block party, while others clustered together, sometimes clutching small children, worried expressions on their faces.
On the off chance power was restored quickly, I gave out my cell phone number to everyone I met, urging them to text me if they saw anything or had a news tip about the power outage.
Ninety hectic minutes later, I ran the last few blocks to ANC, using the flashlight on my phone to find my way in the dark. A meaty security guard I hadn’t seen before stood inside the glass doors of the ANC building, his face lit by the harsh glare of the emergency lights in the lobby.
“I’m Kate Bradley,” I said, out of breath. “I work here.”
“You got ID?”
In the rush, I’d left my ID at home. And I was too new at ANC for him to recognize me. “I left it back at my apartment.”
He shook his head. “Can’t let you in without ID.”
I noticed the firearm on his belt. “I work with Mark Galvin. Call him. He’ll confirm.”
He didn’t budge. “Phones are down. I need ID.”
I zipped through the photos on my phone, found one, and pressed the phone to the glass door.
He peered at it to get a closer look. It was a photo of me reporting from a massive mudslide on the iconic Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu with my former station Channel Eleven’s news banner on screen.
“This is my ID.”
Mark Galvin was happy.
Okay, not happy. Not even cheerful.
But his gray eyes lit up for a brief moment as I played the footage I’d captured.
“You got all this since the power went out?” he asked. Before I could answer, he was waving his hands at a nearby producer who was racing through the newsroom, dimly lit now because we were operating on backup generators. “Isabelle, get this to the editors. Justin, specifically. I want it ready in ten.”
Isabelle looked exhausted, her red hair clipped in a messy bun and her hands juggling a coffee mug, a tablet, and a sheaf of papers, but she took my phone with crisp efficiency. “Back in a minute.”
“You’re surprising me,” Mark said, turning to look at me for the first time. He stood. “You’re sturdier than I expected.”
Sturdier. Was that supposed to be a compliment?
“I’ll take that to mean you like it.”
He glanced through a list on his iPad. “We’re short on reporters tonight, so I need you to get out there and cover the counterterror security precautions NYPD is taking at city landmarks.”
“Terrorism has been ruled out.”
“True. But I covered the Northeast blackout in 2003. When the power went off, it was a free-for-all. People are at their worst in times like this.”
I set out that night armed for battle in a city without power. A city in crisis.
But unlike my first day at ANC, when I’d calmly assembled a tote bag full of a reporter’s essentials, a production coordinator and I had thrown together a backpack with flashlights, phone chargers, a GoPro camera, and several bottles of water in under a minute. She’d even tossed in a loaner phone from ANC, in case the cell service came back on and my phone didn’t work.
“You can never be too careful,” she said with wide eyes, clipping a 130-decibel personal alarm to my bag. Then she reached into a cabinet, pulled out a bright-pink canister of pepper spray, and slapped it in my hand. “Be safe.”
My nerves hummed as I left the busy newsroom and headed into the streets, where the wail of sirens assaulted me from every direction.
It turns out that New York City is very dark without the streetlights, the glare of taxi headlights, or the floodlights that shone on the facades of some buildings. And without the interior apartment lights or the fluorescent-lit grocers and stores, those streets without heavy traffic were so dark I couldn’t see more than five feet in front of me without a flashlight.
Above our heads in the inky-blue sky, I could make out hundreds of newly visible stars, a sight that seemed to baffle many, including a group who gestured wildly at the sky. I stopped to watch with them. On a night with only a sliver of a moon and no clouds, I was amazed at the glittering map of constellations unfurled above us. I’d seen the stars stretch from horizon to horizon once deep in the Anza-Borrego desert, but in the sprawling sky glow of LA, I was lucky if I could spot the Big Dipper.
“Wow,” I whispered.
“Exactly,” the woman next to me answered.
After that, making my way in the dark illuminated only by flashlight was unsettling. I had no way to tell the difference between, say, a woman clutching a baby and a man with a gun. “Hello,” I said as people passed by. Some responded with a quick remark about the power outage, but plenty didn’t respond at all, as though the darkness had somehow taken away their voices.
I headed first to city hall, the landmark nearest ANC. I’d been there once with my father when I was in grade school and remembered gazing up at its soaring rotunda and feeling dizzy. My nerves were on high alert now because Mark had told me to expect “heavily armed teams of special counterterror officers,” but as I passed the fountain in City Hall Park, I saw no signs of law enforcement.
Instead, I saw . . . balloons.
Hundreds of them. No, thousands. Purple and white balloons tied to every column and balcony of the iconic white limestone building and every flagpole, lamppost, and fence in the square. Thousands more were tied to the trees that flanked the building. Lit by the silver light from the emergency lamps in the square, they had an almost mystical glow to them. As I watched them sway and bob in the gentle breeze, tingling goose bumps raced through my body, and I was overcome by a feeling simple and pure: awe.
I’d had a similar feeling when my dad took me to see the Grand Canyon when I was eight. And I remembered experiencing something like it when I watched gold and red leaves pirouette in the light wind one fall day in DC. But I always thought the feeling was reserved for majestic things we saw in nature. Yet here it was, sparked by the sight of balloons.
The hundreds of people milling around the square seemed mesmerized as well, snapping selfies with the balloons as a backdrop. I found Melanie McComb from the Office of Management and Budget on the city hall steps, easily identifiable as a city official by her charcoal-gray suit and heels on a hot night during a power outage. She denied the City was behind the balloon displays. “The New York City government is not wasting money on thousands of balloons when we have a power crisis,” she said curtly.