You Didn’t Have To Squeeze It But You Did And I Thank You

Hizzoner gets in hot water (or lukewarm water, if your boiler is still out) after giving thanks to Con Edision during the waning moments of the massive blackout in Western Queens:

With Queens elected officials standing behind him, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg used a City Hall news briefing yesterday to forcefully defend the performance of Consolidated Edison in handling a power failure in western Queens that stretched into its eighth day.

The mayor’s comments appeared to surprise the officials, particularly when Mr. Bloomberg said Kevin M. Burke, chairman and chief executive of Con Edison, “deserves a thanks from the city.”

The Queens politicians openly shook their heads and rolled their eyes during the mayor’s remarks. He also said Con Edison had “done a very good job” in handling the power failure, which continued to affect thousands of people.

The mayor has been criticized more and more for his reaction to the power failures as they have dragged on, and yesterday his remarks drew surprisingly candid rebukes from the politicians who represent the affected area and appeared with Mr. Bloomberg at City Hall.

“I almost walked out,” City Councilman Eric N. Gioia said later. “I was shocked and disappointed by his defense of Kevin Burke today.”

What a scene — a posse of pissed-off politicians behind the mayor sputtering, “must grandstand . . . does not compute . . . must grandstand . . . does not compute.” If nothing else, Bloomberg seems like he has a sick sense of humor.

Meanwhile, had Con Ed preemptively shut down the power instead of keeping it going, four to five times as many Western Queens residents would have been in darkness (and without air conditioning and refrigeration and television and the internet and all those things that you take for granted while you have electricity), albeit for a much shorter time:

It was around 9 p.m. a week ago, on July 18. For nearly 24 hours, Consolidated Edison had been fighting to keep the power on in Queens. Six of the 22 feeder cables that distribute electricity to a half-million people in the western portion of the borough had failed. Then, in slightly more than a half-hour, four more feeders began to fail.

At a command center near Union Square in Manhattan, top managers at the utility had to choose: keep the power running and take the risk of causing more damage to the system, or shut down the network serving western and northern Queens, guaranteeing a wide blackout but one that could likely be resolved quickly.

“We were right there on the edge, thinking about whether to do this,” said John F. Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison. When the load eased slightly, he said, the worst seemed to have passed. “We made the decision to hold on, realizing the impact of shutting it down.”

So they kept the power on, the trouble spread, and eventually up to 100,000 residents of Queens were plunged into as long as eight days of sweltering darkness. Far more people, four to five times as many, would have lost power had the entire local network gone down, but the misery of the more limited blackout has lasted much longer than it probably would have in a controlled shutdown.

As a resident of Western Queens with power, I say thank you to Con Ed!