Wide Chicago Blackout Disrupts Rush-Hour Traffic, Businesses

Emergency crews worked Tuesday to restore electricity to wide areas of the city hit by a power failure that left 200,000 customers in the dark, forced businesses and offices to close and snarled rush-hour traffic.

The city’s downtown water-filtration plant was knocked out briefly, as were nearly a dozen radio stations broadcasting from the John Hancock Center.

The clock atop the landmark Wrigley Building stopped at 5:35 a.m.

“Lines are coming back one at a time,” said William Cormack, a vice president for Commonwealth Edison Co., the utility that provides most of the city’s power. “It is a long, slow process, but full power will be restored today.”

Most Power Restored

Edison spokesman Robert Dwyer said power had been restored to 95% of the utility’s customers by late afternoon.

The problem, traced to a substation where a conduction device was shorted out by moisture, was first reported to Edison on Monday night, when the utility began receiving complaints of blinking lights, utility spokesman Carter Brydon said.

The power failure was confined largely to the city’s North Side, stretching from the Chicago River downtown to nearly five miles north. From Lake Michigan on the east, it stretched about three miles to the west.

City officials closed the nation’s busiest traffic court because banks of computers could not be restored to handle the daily crush.

“There will be a lot of unhappy citizens who go down (to traffic court) to answer the ticket and find it is being set over to another date,” court spokesman Bill Juneau said.

Businesses Close

Montgomery Ward & Co. offices, the IBM Building and the Merchandise Mart, headquarters for some of Chicago’s largest businesses, were closed to all but a handful of workers.

“I have so much work I could cry,” attorney Catherine Fuller said after being turned away from her office in the IBM Building. “I’ll probably go home and clean my apartment.”

At the John Hancock Center, one employee climbed 50 flights of stairs to get to work.

“I was able to take an elevator up to the 44th floor and, from there, I had to walk up to the 94th,” said Dan Fields, who works for Lee Communications, a company that provides traffic information to media outlets.

Chicago Transit Authority bus and train riders experienced some delays because of the power failure and inoperative traffic signals, CTA spokesman Don Yabush said. But, he added, most of those problems were corrected by the end of the rush hour.