Chicago Power Outages Shutter Downtown

Confusion descended on downtown Thursday when a series of electrical problems darkened hundreds of office buildings, snarled traffic and brought the Chicago Board of Trade to a halt.

Thousands of commuters left early for the day when power was lost, pushing the rush hour forward by hours. Police struggled to keep cars moving through darkened intersections.

Extra buses were called in to handle the crush and generators were set up to light Union Station, which handles Amtrak and suburban commuter trains.

Brian Kelly, a worker at a 13th-floor temporary employment agency, said people struggled to get out when his building’s lights went out.

“It was kind of scary. It was so dark and it was chaotic trying to get our stuff before we had to get out,” he said. “It was total confusion. It was mass panic.”

Board of Trade officials closed the markets at 1 p.m. after they were warned by utility officials that power was going to be shut down, said board spokesman Bret Gallaway.

“This is a tremendous disruption of trading,” Gallaway said. “The last minutes of trading are often some of the busiest trading of the day.”

Paul McCoy, vice president of Commonwealth Edison, said cables leading from two big transformers failed Wednesday night and Thursday morning at a substation, leaving 2,300 customers west of downtown without electricity.

“Like everybody, I’m upset and we expect the answers directly from ComEd,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a news conference. “We deserve answers.”

John Rowe, CEO of ComEd’s parent company, Unicom, called the utility’s performance “absolutely, totally unacceptable” and said he had appointed a committee to study its problems and recommend how to restructure the company.

The utility was forced later Thursday to shut down power for about 90 minutes to another 670 business customers in a 30-block business district that includes the Board of Trade, the federal courthouse and many law firms after a transformer at another substation overheated. That transformer had been helping to keep up with demand at the defective station.

Power to all customers was restored by late Thursday night.

“I had to shut down all our computers,” said Eamon Tierney, a systems manager in a Michigan Avenue building. “Then I had to walk down 32 flights of stairs.”

At the 27-floor Chicago Hilton and Towers, hotel staff dug into their Y2K emergency stash of fluorescent glow sticks to help evacuate guests who wanted to leave their rooms.

“We didn’t think we would have to use them unless the worst Y2K case scenario happened,” said Robert Allegrini, a spokesman for the hotel. “Who would have thought they would come in so handy before New Year’s Eve?”

Allegrini said they brought out about 6,000 of the glow sticks to light darkened stairwells in the hotel and to hand out to guests trying to find their way around.

“It was like being at a rock concert, everybody waving their lights in the air,” he said.

ComEd is already under fire for an outage during July’s brutal heat wave that affected about 100,000 customers. In 1995, the utility’s customers also suffered outages during that summer’s extreme heat, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of people.