Con Ed Defends Blackout Decisions, Promises Changes
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In a 600-page report offering the most comprehensive details to date of what plunged more than 100,000 Queens residents into darkness for 10 days this summer, Consolidated Edison defends its much-criticized decision to leave a number of people in Astoria, Sunnyside, Hunters Point, and Long Island City without power rather than to shut down the entire electricity network in northwest Queens — a step the utility said might have shortened the blackout for everyone, but endangered many more people.
In addition, utility officials said they are establishing new electricity feeder cables and revising the method they use to count the number of people affected by blackouts, including considering the use of “smart meters” that can transmit usage data without representatives having to go house to house.
The revised count methods are an attempt to address another criticism—that the utility grossly underestimated the number of people affected by the outages by releasing statistics of how many “customers” were affected. A customer can range from a single house to an entire building. About 25,000 “customers” were affected, Con Ed officials said at the time, which by a commonly used metric meant more than 100,000 people.
Discussing the report, Con Ed’s CEO, Kevin Burke, yesterday blamed the July blackout on the “confluence of really unusual events” — three system failures that together cut off electricity and hampered Con Ed from restoring service for more than a week.
It all started with a cable fire, he said.
The report angered elected officials who represent the blacked-out communities, who have been critical of the utility and renewed calls for the government to “force” change.
“We will be working to change the laws and regulations to force Con Edison to do the right thing, to force them to reimburse people properly, to force them to have a better communication system to force them to tell the truth to the people of New York about how bad the damage is and most importantly to force them to maintain their system properly so this doesn’t happen,” Assemblyman Michael Gianaris said.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Bloomberg, Jennifer Falk, called Con Ed’s report “an important first step.”
