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  August 17, 2003
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Saluting New Yorkers' Resilience During the Blackout
By Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

This week New York is virtually back to normal following the biggest blackout in our nation's history, which affected 50 million people in the Northeast, the Midwest, and Southern Canada. It's a good time to take stock of how we responded to this emergency-and we've really got a lot to be proud of. Our police officers, firefighters, emergency management personnel and health professionals worked incredibly hard to get us through the crisis safely. It was a demonstration that when the chips are down, New Yorkers get together to help and care for each other, as we always do.

Let me tell you more about this story. Last Thursday night and early Friday morning, 10,000 police officers patrolled our streets, directing traffic, preventing crime and helping those in need. They responded to some 80,000 911 calls--more than double the average. Three thousand firefighters put out 60 serious fires--up from an average of ten a night. Our Finest and Bravest performed some 800 elevator rescues. EMS responded to 5,000 calls--600 more than their record for any other 24-hour period. Under incredibly difficult circumstances, our City-run hospitals treated people with the professionalism and care that New Yorkers deserve. The MTA did a superb job of safely evacuating thousands of subway riders from the tunnels below our streets. And our Office of Emergency Management made sure that every City agency worked together, from the second the lights went off.

As the City's power providers restored services throughout the five boroughs on Friday, our Administration began getting the city back on a normal footing-a process that continued Saturday and will go on today as well. Sanitation crews have been working overtime to pick up trash left behind by the thousands of people who walked and gathered on city streets Thursday night. On Friday and throughout the weekend, we opened cooling centers across the city to provide relief from the summer heat. 911 operators continue to do a tremendous job of answering calls for emergency assistance, and the 24-hour citizen service hotline at 311 remains the best place to request or get information about non-emergency City services.

Any crisis is also a learning opportunity -- and we'll analyze what worked and what didn't during this blackout, so that in the future, we can make our response procedures even better. Along with State and Federal officials, we'll now be pressing to find out how such an unprecedented power outage could have occurred. But one lesson of this blackout is already crystal clear. Many of us can remember the chaos and disorder that accompanied the last major power failure that hit New York in 1977. What a contrast with the way we got through this emergency. New Yorkers showed that the City that burned in the 1970s, when facing similar circumstances today, is now a very different place. We're a City that has the resilience to conquer adversity--not succumb to it.

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