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Back Stories: The Blackout Of 2003

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- WCBS reporter Marla Diamond was covering a story at MTA headquarters on Madison Avenue in 2003, when she heard the anchors say there had been a power outage.

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"I really didn't think much about it, these things happen," she recalls.

But she soon realized she was in the midst of a blackout.

"People all over the place with their briefcases and their bags. They were sitting, they were jamming the darkened lobby of the Grand Hyatt," she says. "People were definitely freaked out. I mean, no power all throughout the city, it was two years after 9/11."

When former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced there was no link to terrorism, people relaxed a bit.

"It was a very different atmosphere than the blackout in '77. This time, there was no violence, no looting," Diamond says. "New Yorkers really embraced New Yorkers and made the best of it."

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