Queens Blackout: Up to 1,000 Customers Still Without Power

NEW YORK (AP) – Nine days into a power outage that darkened large swaths of Queens, utility officials said they couldn’t say when service would be restored to 1,300 people who remained without electricity on Tuesday.“We’re trying,” said Consolidated Edison spokesman Chris Olert.The utility said 332 customers _ or approximately 1,328 people _ remained without electricity in northwest Queens on Tuesday, a major improvement from the roughly 25,000 customers affected at the height of the blackout but not enough to quell the anger over the outages. A customer can represent anything from a single-family home to an entire apartment building, roughly translated to four individuals per customer.Mayor Michael Bloomberg said power problems may just be something New Yorkers need to deal with occasionally. He praised residents for how they handled the outages.“Once again New Yorkers have shown what they’re made of and their resilience,” he said. “Everybody is sad that it happened, but I think we’ve come out of this as well as we could have and from now on, we’ll find out what happened and do what we can to prevent it.”Bloomberg was asked to elaborate on his reasons for consistently supporting Con Ed, a favorite target of previous mayors, lawmakers and New Yorkers who have endured power problems over the years. At a news conference Monday, the mayor said the company and its CEO deserved a round of thank-yous, eliciting horrified looks on the faces of some state and local lawmakers attending the briefing.He explained Tuesday that he feels encouragement is more productive than blame.“Criticizing them, particularly when you need them, is not a way to incent people,” he said. “And helping people when they’re doing their best, even if the results aren’t what you want, is what you do to get people to come and work for you and give 110 percent, and that’s what this city needs.”But state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said that Con Edison “failed to heed the warnings from an earlier blackout and that the Public Service Commission’s oversight of the utility has been wholly inadequate.”He pointed to a report he wrote in 2000 examining the effects of a 1999 blackout in Manhattan and urged Con Edison to develop tests for detecting vulnerable equipment and to improve crisis communication with customers once power was restored.Olert said the blackout could have been shortened if Con Ed managers had decided to temporarily shut down the area’s network. That would have cut the power to a much larger swathe of Queens, but it would have prevented further damage and made it easier to bring all customers back on line more quickly.Con Ed officials defended the decision not to shut down the network, telling The New York Times in Tuesday editions that they had believed they could keep the system running. Instead, the trouble spread.“We decided we thought we could keep the network in service. I think it was the right decision,” Con Edison CEO Kevin Burke said. “The impact on the people of northwest Queens would have been much worse” if Con Ed had decided to shut down the network, he said.Burke has said that the utility was “focused exclusively on restoration” of power and that the causes of the blackout would be investigated later.

Queens Blackout: Up to 1,000 Customers Still Without Power

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