NYC Blackout: Subway Passengers Plunged Into Darkness During Manhattan Power Outage
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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Part of New York City's subway system lost power in Saturday night's mass blackout, leaving riders in the dark.
Commuters' minds rushed into survival mode. When it first happened, nobody knew what was going on.
"I was coming to 59th Street, but the power just stopped suddenly, went out. Lights went out. It's pitch black down there. We were stuck down there for, I'd say 40 minutes," Bronx resident Marilyn Seabrooks said.
"Kids on the train with their mothers, everybody crying, kids are crying. Everybody get off the train. It's just crazy," Brooklyn resident Troy McDermott said.
Passengers were forced to find other ways to get off some of the trains and out of the stations, CBS2's Marc Liverman reports.
"The whole thing is black. People were using their phones or else you wouldn't know where to go," McDermott said.
Around 9 p.m., the Metropolitan Transportation Authority put out a tweet saying some of their signals were affected by the outage. They later said the entire system was affected.
Police taped off subway entrances. The MTA confirmed at least four stations were fully in the dark and closed to the public.
"Everybody wanna know what's going on, but they're not really saying nothing. They're just telling us to wait," McDermott said.
Above ground, streetlights were out all along the West Side Highway and drivers sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Passersby even helped direct traffic.
To stop the chaos, the NYPD had to shut down traffic from 42nd Street up to 71st Street between the Hudson River and Fifth Avenue.
Electricity was fully restored throughout the city by midnight.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal was still experiencing equipment outages Sunday as a result of the outage.
Some escalators, elevators and kiosks are still not working, and the terminal air condition system is not fully on line.
