New York City residents and top officials are fed up with Con Edison after another massive blackout left 50,000 Brooklyn and Queens customers without power during the summer’s hottest weekend. As of Monday, thousands were still left in the dark and demanding answers.
Con Ed customers in parts of the two boroughs lost power late Sunday as a crippling heat wave scorched the city, leaving people not only in the dark, but without much-needed air conditioning as temperatures soared around 100 degrees. Con Edison said it severed service to many of those customers in a preemptive move meant to “protect the integrity of the energy system.”
“This should not have happened,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday, “and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” De Blasio called for an investigation into Sunday’s blackout, which had a significant impact on Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Bergen Beach.
As of Monday morning, 33,000 customers had power restored, but the remaining customers were still dealing with outages, Con Ed said.
In a heated press conference on Monday, De Blasio went so far as to suggest Con Ed step aside in its job of providing power to New York City.
“If Con Ed cannot answer us — why these things are happening and what they’re going to do differently to stop them — then why are we depending on a private company for something so vital?” the mayor asked. “We don’t depend on a private company for water or for policing or for fire protection… If they can’t handle the job, it’s time to look at new alternatives.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday also tore into the utility company.
“We have been through this situation with Con Ed time and again, and they should have been better prepared – period,” Cuomo said in a statement. “This was not a natural disaster; there is no excuse for what has happened in Brooklyn.”
Cuomo said he was deploying 200 state troopers, 100 generators and 50 light towers to help Brooklyn with the crisis. The state will also widen its investigation into a July 13 blackout in Manhattan to include Sunday’s outages in Brooklyn, Cuomo said.
In that blackout, much of Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side saw power outages due to an issue with a transmission line. At its peak, the number of customers without power reached approximately 72,000, and subway service was disrupted on the A, C, D, F and M lines.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brooklynites were outraged over the power outage. “Since you voluntarily cut my power off 12 hours ago and still haven’t restored it, will I be reimbursed for the refrigerator full of f—ing food that will be going in the trash?” tweeted Jason Solomon.
Since you voluntarily cut my power off 12 hours ago and still haven’t restored it, will I be reimbursed for the refrigerator full of fucking food that will be going in the trash?
— Jason Solomon (@solomonster) July 22, 2019
Con Ed said it expected to have power restored to all remaining customers by Monday afternoon, but as of deadline that had not happened. The company on Monday was distributing dry ice in Canarsie and Flatlands.
“We are completely focused on getting customers back in service. Customer service representatives are in southeast Brooklyn providing assistance as crews work to restore the remaining customers in that area, as well as other parts of our service area,” the company tweeted through its @ConEdison handle.
