Power, Water Restored For Hundreds In Kew Gardens After 2 Days

KEW GARDENS, QUEENS — At 4:45 a.m. Tuesday, as Natalia Kozikowska tried to sleep, the lights suddenly turned on in her Kew Gardens apartment.

But she wasn't disgruntled. She was ecstatic.

Kozikowska was among the estimated 700 Kew Gardens residents whose power and water had been out for nearly three days, after a weekend of extreme temperatures took a toll on the city's aging infrastructure and caused mass outages.

The length of the Kew Gardens outage was due to "extensive damage to the system," a Con Ed spokesperson told Patch.

"I was so relieved the suffering was over for all of us," Kozikowska told Patch.

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In that nearly three-day span, the plight of Kew Gardens residents went virtually unnoticed, as widespread outages in Brooklyn dominated headlines.

Local officials said Con Ed, contrary to common practice, failed to notify them of the outage. They first learned of the outages from a Patch news report.

"I said, this is a pretty big deal — how come nobody knows about this?" said David Aronov, who works in City Council Member Karen Koslowitz's office. "We were shocked. Nobody reached out to us at all."

Kew Gardens residents say they felt like the city didn't care what was happening to them.

"[It was] disheartening seeing Con Ed bulletins and news reports saying 'mission accomplished' and that the outage was over, when they meant only for Brooklyn," David Giunta, who lives on 118th Street, told Patch.

The power first went out in Kew Gardens early Sunday afternoon, residents said. That also meant no water for some residents, whose buildings rely on electricity to pump water to tenants.

First, Con Ed workers told them the power would come back within a few hours, then they said Monday morning.

Kozikowska grabbed her cat, walked down the six flights of stairs to her lobby, then headed to her mother's house to spend the night somewhere cooler.

Monday morning became Monday afternoon, afternoon became evening, evening became late Monday night.

Kew Gardens resident Melissa Trott couldn't take another day in her hot apartment, so she booked a hotel room.

NYC Emergency Management crews delivered 1,400 bottles of water and the city's Department of Environmental Protection set up temporary water faucets. Residents pitched in to bring water and ice upstairs to elderly and disabled neighbors stranded by the elevator outages.

Then Monday night became early Tuesday morning, and Con Ed crews finally got power up and running.

Koslowitz, who represents Kew Gardens, was furious. Her office's contact at Con Ed was on leave, and no one else had notified them of the outages.

Her staffers spent the day Monday convincing Con Ed to upgrade the outages to emergency status. When Con Ed declined to distribute dry ice, as they were doing in Brooklyn, staffers called the city's emergency management division and got a crew to deliver water bottles.

"This is not a joke," Koslowitz tweeted Monday night. "If this was Manhattan, service would've been restored the same day it went out."

They, too, were left in the dark.

If your food or medication went bad because of a residential power outage, you can file a claim with Con Edison within 30 days of the outage. For more information click here.