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Big City loosing electricity, specific problems
Queens Blackout Persists, Leaving 100,000 Without Power, or Answers
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/ny...ewanted=1&_r=1
It will take at least until Sunday ? six days after the blackout began ? to restore power to everyone, Con Edison said.An estimated 100,000 people or more remained without power in western Queens last night, as Con Edison conceded that the blackout that began Monday affected more than 10 times as many customers as it had said previously, and that it still had no explanation for the failure.
A chorus of elected officials demanded investigation and punishment of the utility, and more help for the area?s sweltering, dispirited residents. They voiced particular concern for thousands of elderly residents with no electricity, no working elevators and, in some cases, no water.
Utility officials and others said this power failure was perplexing, unlike previous blackouts that darkened large swaths of the city and were corrected in a day or two. This time, new problems have cropped up day after day: dozens of manhole fires, transformer fires and, most seriously, electrical cables? burning out and needing replacement.
?This is a very strange phenomenon,? said Joe Flaherty, a consultant to Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America.
Chris Olert, a Con Edison spokesman, said, ?We?ll take those cables that were damaged and analyze them, but until then, we won?t know what happened.?
The blackout has exposed an apparently serious weakness at the utility: its inability to measure the size of a problem. For three days, Con Edison gave estimates ranging from 1,200 to 2,100 customers without power. But those were based solely on the number of phone calls from people complaining. A customer can be a single house or a business, or a large building with dozens of apartments and hundreds of residents.
The company acknowledged yesterday, after a block-by-block canvass conducted Thursday night, that at least 25,000 customers were blacked out, possibly more. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg estimated that that meant at least 100,000 people lacked power in their homes, a number Con Edison did not dispute.
An even larger number of customers, 90,000, had reduced voltage, Con Edison said; that translates to several hundred thousand people. Some people with reduced power said it was so diminished that conditions were barely better than a blackout; elevators and air-conditioners did not work, and food went bad in refrigerators.
?We weren?t trying to be misleading,? Mr. Olert said of the numbers. ?We went with what we knew.?
Mr. Bloomberg called the utility?s underestimate ?annoying,? but other elected officials used much stronger language. Assemblyman Michael N. Gianaris called for criminal charges against Con Edison, and District Attorney Richard A. Brown of Queens said his office would investigate.
By underestimating the size of the problem, City Councilman Eric N. Gioia said, Con Edison ?slowed everybody?s responses, which put people?s lives in danger.?
?When we first talked to the mayor?s office and the Red Cross about the extent of this, they were skeptical because of what they?d heard from Con Ed,? he said.
The mayor declined to join the attack, as did the utility workers union, which has often criticized Con Edison.
?Con Edison has hundreds of thousands of miles of cable that need to be maintained, and each cable has a shelf life,? said Mr. Flaherty, to whom the union referred questions. Mr. Bloomberg said that nine centers for the elderly would remain open today, when they are usually closed, and that garbage trucks would make extra runs to remove mounds of spoiled food at curbsides. The police put mobile light towers at darkened intersections, he said, and ?flooded the neighborhood with officers.?
But older residents like Catherine Volpe said they felt they had been left to fend for themselves. Ms. Volpe, who declined to give her age, lives on the 12th floor of a complex that had no power, Berkeley Towers, on 39th Drive near 52nd Street. She had been carrying bottled water up the stairs to her frail neighbors.
?I?m very angry,? she said. ?I think we were actually lied to.?
In most places, if a power line goes down, the customers who rely on it go dark. But in New York City?s grid, each major line has multiple backups, making it theoretically the most reliable in the country.
The city is divided into dozens of local networks, built around more than 1,000 ?feeder? cables, each as thick as a man?s arm and carrying as much as 27,000 volts. If one or two feeders in a network stop working, the others automatically pick up the burden.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/ny...ewanted=2&_r=1
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