During a 1994 blackout, L.A. residents called 911 when they saw the Milky Way for the first time
More like the City of Too Much Light…
In 1994, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles at 4:30 a.m. The shaking woke residents, who discovered the power had gone out citywide.
Some left their houses or peered outside to check on the neighborhood. It was eerily dark — no streetlights and few cars at that late hour.
They looked up at the sky. It was flush with cosmic bodies that had been invisible up to that point — twinkling stars, clustered galaxies, distant planets, even a satellite or two. Then some people became nervous. What was that large silvery cloud that trailed over the city? It looked so sinister they called 911.
That cloud was the Milky Way. They had never seen it before.
“Since so many of us never see a non-light-polluted night sky from one year to the next, a mythology about what the people think a true star-filled sky looks like has emerged,” said Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory.
Cities worldwide have been blotting out the night sky for over a century. Light pollution is a particular concern in Los Angeles due to its geographical tendency to trap coastal haze and refract light more dramatically. With the largest municipal street system in the nation and infamous urban sprawl, L.A. streetlights are a force of nature.
The city’s light pollution emits an intense sky glow, also known as the bright halo that appears over urban areas at night. In recent years it’s become even more of a problem, when the city installed 165,000 LED streetlights. The move slashed energy use by 60% and netted $8 million in energy savings per year; however, LEDs emit more, bluer light than old technology. Bye bye, stars.
For those who live in urban areas, it’s shocking to think that older cities like London and New York were almost entirely dark upon nightfall. Even younger Los Angeles was camouflaged between the imposing San Gabriel Mountains and the yawning Pacific Ocean — until 1875.
Until the 1870s, light was synonymous with fire. But the invention of electricity meant humans could harness virtually unlimited stores of bright light. Los Angeles was among the first cities to introduce tower lights, which were erected on poles high above street level in the 1880s. Still, most cities turned off these lights during a full moon, preferring “a twilight level of illumination to be the ideal,” according to Urban Lighting, Light Pollution and Society.
Others saw electric lighting as a sunlight replacement under the complete control of humans. In 1885, officials in Paris even considered a scheme to erect one central tower so full of high-wattage lamps that it would create an artificial sun when evening approached.
Such displays, the Eiffel Tower and New York City’s “Great White Way” among them, were symbols of a city’s status and growth. At one point, Hannibal, Missouri, claimed it was “the best-lighted city in the world.”
Tower lighting would ultimately fall out of favor. The technology created steep shadows on any building over two stories. As cities grew vertically and automobile use universalized, cities began to expand their borders, installing shorter but more numerous streetlights to aid driving safety. Even suburban areas buzzed with power. The moon was now useless as a light source.
That time period formed the system of public lighting we know today, for better and worse.
According to the International Dark-Sky Association, Los Angeles’s sky glow is visible from an airplane 200 miles away. Places like this mean a full two-thirds of Americans, living under orange domes of artificial light, have lost the ability to see the Milky Way.
So, other than aesthetics, who cares? For starters, it makes astronomers’ lives harder. Cities like Flagstaff, Arizona, with its Lowell Observatory, made some of the earliest civic efforts in the mid-century to control light pollution; it was named the first International Dark Sky City in 2001. Also, animal species like sea turtles rely on dark beaches to lay eggs, and light pollution has disrupted their breeding instincts. Migrating birds and insects are similarly impacted. Human circadian rhythms have drastically altered with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of electrical light. Studies show that people revert to more natural sleep routines when they taper use of lights and screen time with dimming skylight. They’re healthier too; a recent study suggests bright neighborhoods correlate with higher rates of breast cancer.
Even if none of these reasons mattered, most of a city’s artificial light is wasted anyway. Sky glow is the result of light directed upward instead of where it is most useful: on streets and in homes. It is unnecessary, merely “ornamental” light.
True, there are some tradeoffs to limiting light pollution. Without electric light, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy outdoor baseball games on summer nights, when the moths bump against the lamps and the whole city seems to sigh contentedly. We wouldn’t have Las Vegas, where the Luxor Hotel’s Sky Beam can be seen from space.
On the other hand, we’re losing our mythical and ancient connection with the night sky, which provided us with wonders like the Mayan calendar and Stonehenge. A view of the stars and planets keeps our overworked, increasingly politicized lives in perspective. “When you look at the night sky, you realize how small we are within the cosmos,” said astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. “It’s kind of resetting of your ego. To deny yourself that state of mind, either willingly or unwittingly, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.”
Some people realize this privilege is in peril. They’ve chosen to live on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, just far enough away from Los Angeles to enjoy the night sky. “I can see millions more stars than people that live in the city,” one resident told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s unbelievable. I can see the Milky Way — the whole Milky Way.”
Then a parking lot five miles away from his ranch installed a bright lamp. That single light eliminated a few more stars from his view.
