'It feels just like September 11 again'

No power. No traffic lights. No air conditioning. No subway trains. At 4.11pm on a hot August afternoon New York, like Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto and dozens of other towns and cities, effectively came to a halt.

Everywhere people were stranded. Thousands were trapped underground when rush-hour subway trains stopped in tunnels, while scores of office workers became trapped in lifts.

All over the city workers were forced to evacuate their buildings, trudging down long flights of stairs before milling round aimlessly on the streets outside.

Inevitably, they all had one thought on their minds. "It feels like September 11 all over again," said Giovanni Leonardo, 26. "It's that 'What's going on?' feeling."

Jessica Nottes was on the observation deck of the Empire State Building when the power went out.

"We had to walk down 86 flights of stairs," she said. "I kept thinking about the Twin Towers and how everybody would get down, but everybody was calm."

Then, as day turned to night, everyone could see what they already knew - someone had turned the city off.

In Times Square, a place of neon lights and brightness, there was only dark, and long queues of people waiting for buses that seemed they would never come. Broadway, the place where the show must go on, was dark and quiet and full of disappointed theatregoers.

With no subways and the streets in gridlock, most people faced a long walk home. The bridges that connect Manhattan with the rest of New York were a solid mass of people as commuters tried to find their way back to the suburbs.

One woman trying to get home held up a sign which read "Westchester for $". What buses there were were crammed to overflowing, and with good reason - they were about the only places in the city where the air conditioning was still working.

As people walked they tried dialling time and time again on their mobile phones, but the network was jammed solid. Every phone box had a long queue outside as people tried to reach their families. Gabriela Mira, 40, was waiting for one phone with her six-month-old daughter.

"I had to get out of the house," she said. "It was so dark, and everything was off, and I was scared. No air conditioner, the phones - they need electricity. And it's so, so hot."

Some commuters did what commuters always do when they cannot get a train - they went to the bar, drinking their beers as fast as they could before the bottles got too warm as temperatures hovered in the nineties.

At Patrick Conway's, a bar near Grand Central Terminal, the owner promised to stay open as long as the power from his generator held out.

At the Port Authority bus terminal tempers frayed. Waves of confused and angry commuters were held back by a small contingent of police

officers trying in vain to get them out of the building. "Where are we supposed to go?" one man shouted, his shirt drenched with sweat. "There are a hundred thousand people out there on the street."

An officer wiped his brow and shouted back: "What do you want from me? I didn't cause this blackout. Now turn around and get out of

the building." The blackout brought out the best - and the worst - in people.

Dwayne Griffin, a federal worker who was trapped between subway stations in Manhattan, described how a man with a cigarette lighter volunteered to lead passengers out the pitch black tunnel. "It was too hot to wait," he said.

At a café ¯n 45th Street the staff wheeled freezers of ice cream bars on to the pavement and shouted to passers-by that prices had been slashed from $3 to $1.

"Everything must go," said manager Ranjit Singh. "We don't want to have to throw it out when it melts."

Others took a different approach to the economics of the blackout. Up in Harlem a young man walked around 125th Street offering "flashlights - $25: batteries - $10".

An elderly woman pushed a shopping trolley filled with "ice-cold water" which she was selling for $5 a bottle. The bottles were hot. But most people did their best to help. At one of the worst junctions in the city, Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, hairdresser Christopher Davie turned traffic cop for the afternoon. Some shouted "Bravo" to him.

A tourist from Montreal got out of her car and gave him a peach. Someone else gave him a whistle.

"There were ambulances trying to get through," he said. "Somebody had to get out there and do this."

Amid the chaos and frustration, the anger and the humour, there were small moments of tragedy. A middle-aged woman walking down the many flights of stairs in the Met Life Building collapsed, vomited and stopped breathing.

Paramedics attempted to revive her, and desperately tried calling for an ambulance. But there were no ambulances to be had. By the time an ambulance was flagged down, it was all too late.