There’s nothing more local than a powerful failure

Yes, it was hot everywhere in the northeast. The heat, the humidity, the discomfort was just a given. But when I was driving down Bloomfield Ave. today aroudn 3 pm to take Noah to his eye doctor appointment, and we passed through one, two, three non-working traffic lights, we knew instantly that the story was bigger. Not bigger geographically. Bigger locally.

It meant a power failure. And the more lights we passed, the wider the failure was. A power failure in 99 degree heat is always a big local story.

As the son of a publisher, Noah of course knew this was a big story for Baristanet, and called my partner, Liz George, to take the story while I drove. Through the magic of modern communications, I was able to update her (the power outage went all the way to Verona) by phone. I’m pretty sure we were the first to break the story of the power failure, which wound up affecting 75,000 customers. Though the Star Ledger and all the local radio and TV jumped on it, as usual the Montclair Times, the local newspaper of record, ceded the breaking news coverage to us. And as usual, it was a huge traffic day for us: 13,000 visits for the day, almost 2,000 just in the 4 pm hour.

I didn’t even know whether my own house was affected until I got back to my street. (It seemed less important than getting the news out and picking up a few non-perishables from the grocery store.) It was.

Suddenly, things got even more intensely local. I called my friend Lori, who lives less than a mile away, and who has a pool. She also had electricity. Her house became the unofficial emergency operations, homework and cooling-off center for a whole network of friends. I sat by the pool with my laptop and my cellphone, getting information from Lori’s friends. We also got e-mail tips, and people left information in comments. In an emergency, people are generous with information. And so we learned: power was due back at 7:30 pm, the YMCA was closed, power was due back at 9 pm. Then finally, at 8:05 pm, the power was on again!

Yes, I know. It wasn’t Myanmar and it wasn’t China. It was mainly a bunch of upper-middle-class people with a lot of droopy arugula. But for five hours, if you lived here, it was the only thing that mattered.