Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

The good thing about locating cables underground is that the city is largely immune to power outages during severe weather. The bad thing about locating cables underground is that it becomes difficult to figure out where the problem is once something goes wrong:

Consolidated Edison reported major progress yesterday in the week-old struggle to restore power to western Queens, but thousands faced a new workweek without electricity and frustrations boiled over as some officials called for a declaration of emergency and the resignation of the utility’s chief executive.

Kevin Burke, Con Ed’s chairman and chief executive, said at a 4 p.m. briefing that utility crews had restored power to nearly 16,000 of the approximately 25,000 customers affected by the blackout. In human terms, that meant that the lights, elevators, refrigerators and air-conditioners were back on for an estimated 64,000 of the 100,000 people who had suffered through the ordeal.

In an update last night, Chris Olert, a spokesman for the utility, said that by 5:45 p.m., service had been restored to more than 19,800 customers. That amounts to about 79,200 people, using a layman’s rule of thumb that counts four people for every “customer,” which could be a single home or an entire apartment building.

At a news conference at Con Edison’s headquarters in Manhattan, his second briefing of the weekend after five days of public silence, Mr. Burke said that Con Edison crews were working around the clock “street by street, manhole by manhole, to get all the customers back in service.”

The dwindling numbers suggested that the end might soon be in sight, but Con Edison has come under a barrage of criticism as having grossly underestimated the extent of the blackout, especially in the first few days.

Mr. Burke insisted that he could still provide no estimate of when full power might be restored to eight square miles of Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside, Sunnyside, Hunters Point and other sections. Underground cables had burned out in those areas, apparently overloaded by the utility’s decision to keep the power flowing to most of the 400,000 residents of western Queens despite the loss of 10 major feeder cables that power the area.

That decision meant that all of the area’s power was running through only 12 feeder cables, and through transformers and secondary cables that were not designed to take such a heavy load.

Mr. Burke said he had no explanation for why the 10 major cables went down while Con Edison’s 56 other feeder cable networks continued to work. The root cause of the blackout, one of the city’s most prolonged in decades, is under investigation by the utility itself and by the Queens district attorney’s office, the City Council and the state’s Public Service Commission.

See also: It’s More Or Less 2,000.