On This Day in American History — Nov 9: The Great Boston Fire, the Northeast Blackout Darkens 30 Million

Host 1: Good morning. Welcome to on this day in American history. Today is Monday, November 9th, 2026.

Host 2: So think about the systems keeping your lights on and your city safe right now. We kind of just assume they are robust, right?

Host 1: Yeah, absolutely.

Host 2: But when you look at history, it shows us that a single ignored warning or you know a microscopic glitch can trigger this massive domino effect it creates totally unintended chaos for millions of people.

Host 1: Right, which is exactly the mission of our deep dive today. We are starting with the 154th anniversary of the Great Boston Fire. Fire, so this was in 1872. Picture this, you are there, it is about 7 PM on a Saturday

Host 2: Right.

Host 1: and a fire sparks in the basement of a wholesale dry goods store. It quickly climbs up a wooden elevator shaft just ripping through floors packed with like extremely flammable lace and hoop skirts and cloth.

Host 2: And the real tragedy here is the systemic failure that allowed it to spread so fast. because Fire Chief John Damerell, had actually been begging the city council for new water mains.

Host 1: Oh, so they knew.

Host 2: Yeah. He understood the mechanics of the infrastructure, right? He warned them that the old corroded pipes simply could not build enough pressure to push water up to the upper floors of these newer commercial buildings. But the council just dismissed his warnings as extravagant spending.

Host 1: Wow. And the conditions that night were just a perfect storm, like a recent horse illness had sidelined the department's trained horses, so Damerell had to hire 500 extra men just to drag these massive heavy fire engines through the streets by hand.

Host 2: By hand, yeah. Just brutal.

Host 1: I mean it is basically like trying to fight a modern wildfire using garden hoses while running a marathon.

Host 2: That is a great way to put it.

Host 1: And to make matters worse, you had 100,000 spectators, many of them completely drunk, just swarming the streets and blocking the firemen.

Host 2: Exactly. Well, the disaster did eventually force vital changes, you know, it led to strict national building codes and gave us Boston landmarks like Trinity Church which was rebuilt from the ashes

Host 1: right a silver lining

Host 2: yeah though city officials actually used Chief Damerell's a scapegoat and fired him ironically they did this right around the time they finally installed the new water mains he had been asking for

Host 1: That is incredibly unfair. But you know in Boston that systemic failure moved at the speed of a spreading fire but as we industrialized we interconnected our infrastructure which meant failures could suddenly move at the speed of light.

Host 2: Which brings us right to 1965 the 61st anniversary of the Northeast blackout.

Host 1: Oh the big one.

Host 2: Right at exactly 5 15 5.15 PM so right at rush hour a single tripped relay at a hydroelectric plant up in Ontario created an anomaly here is how an interconnected grid works when one line trips its electrical load automatically reroutes to the next path of least resistance

Host 1: so it basically just overloaded the neighboring lines

Host 2: precisely you had 1.7 million kilowatts that were supposed to go north and they suddenly searched south into the US grid

Host 1: Good grief

Host 2: and that surge tripped the next set of relays which pushed even more power onto fewer lines creating this cascading domino effect. Within 10 minutes 30 million people across the northeast were plunged into total darkness.

Host 1: It is wild how fast that happens. I actually love this story of 11-year-old Jay Hounsell in New Hampshire during this

Host 2: oh yeah the kid with the stick

Host 1: yes right at dusk he whacked a telephone pole with the stick just as the power died across the entire region he ran home absolutely terrified totally convinced he broke the grid

Host 2: that is so funny

Host 1: right meanwhile adults were full on panicking fearing communists or like UFOs had attacked us

Host 2: well it is a funny image now but the resulting 1967 report from that really established how we protect grids today it mandated backup generators for hospitals for instance

Host 1: oh that makes sense

Host 2: yeah and it introduced the concept of controlled brownouts the idea is if you deliberately shed power in targeted areas you relieve the overall pressure you are sacrificing a little localized power to prevent the entire interconnected system from just collapsing

Host 1: right so we went from physical pipes failing to electrical currents cascading but honestly the scariest failures seem to happen when we hand the keys over to automated computer systems

Host 2: oh definitely

Host 1: let's look at 1979 the 47th anniversary of the NORADAD false alarm a warning screen suddenly shows 1400 incoming Soviet ICBMs interceptors go on alert bombers are spinning up the cause a war game test tape

Host 2: Right.

Host 1: Wait, is that even a cascading infrastructure failure or just terrible software architecture? Just think about that for a second. You are relying on the most secure military system on Earth how do you think a simple simulation tape manages to bypass every safeguard to reach the live alert screen

Host 2: so it essentially comes down to a complete lack of data segregation the testing computers were physically networked to the live early warning system

Host 1: you are kidding

Host 2: no there was literally no digital firewall stopping the live system from reading the simulation data as real inputs but before we look at the fallout of that we actually need to clarify a disputed fact

Host 1: oh right about the phone call

Host 2: exactly you might hear older accounts claiming that national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken by a 3 AM phone call about this attack

Host 1: which sounds dramatic

Host 2: very but updated archives show that middle of the night call likely happened during a totally different false alarm in 1980. Today's alert actually happened mid-morning

Host 1: still I mean bombers taking off over a glitch is terrifying

Host 2: oh for sure the crisis was settled in six minutes once sensors confirmed the skies were clear but it spurred massive efforts to physically separate simulation environments from live military networks

Host 1: which is a very good thing okay wrapping up with our extras in a single sentence in 1620 the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod on the old style calendar and in 1967 the uncrewed Apollo 4 launched while the first ever issue of Rolling Stone was published

Host 2: nice and just leaving you with this thought as automation spreads into every facet of our lives today what modern test tape or you know tripped relay is quietly waiting in our systems to cause the next massive blackout or false alarm

Host 1: thanks for tuning in see you back here tomorrow