Mayor Worries About Con Ed As Heat Wave Hits NYC

NEW YORK — With a dangerous heat wave hitting the city, Mayor Bill de Blasio expressed skepticism Wednesday about Con Edison's ability to keep New York City's power running after the weekend's massive blackout.

While he believes Con Ed does not want another mass power failure amid stifling temperatures this weekend, the Democratic mayor said he has not gotten clear answers about how the utility woud prevent a repeat of Saturday's incident that left swaths of Manhattan in the dark for some five hours.

"I am in a jaded place about Con Ed right now," de Blasio said at a news conference in Brooklyn. "I want to have faith. ... But it is not comforting that we don’t have a clear answer about what happened and what they’re doing about it. It’s just not."

Con Ed warned earlier this week that New Yorkers could lose power as temperatures climb into the 90s through the weekend, with a chance of the city's first 100-degree day in seven years.

Equipment failures that were "almost certainly heat-related" caused scattered power outages affecting hundreds of customers on Staten Island Tuesday evening, according to Con Ed spokesperson Allan Drury. Downed wires led to another outage affecting some 1,700 customers in South Brooklyn on Wednesday, officials said.

"We expect that there could be service outages. Those things happen during heat waves," Michael Clendenin, Con Ed's director of media relations, told PIX11 Monday. "Our crews are ready to respond and fix problems before they become bigger."

"We know it’s going to be intense," he added.

Con Ed has stressed that neither heat nor excess demand for power played a role in Saturday's blackout. The company blamed the incident Monday on a relay protection system that did not isolate a 13,000-volt distribution cable that faulted on Manhattan's West Side.

But de Blasio said the city was "still getting mixed messages" about why that failure happened and how Con Ed would address such problems going forward.

"I don’t know exactly how they would handle that situation again because they’re not giving me a straight answer," the mayor said.

Saturday's failure was the city's first major blackout in 13 years. Two others have struck the Big Apple during heat waves: The August 2003 failure that affected cities throughout the Northeast, and the July 2006 outage that roiled more than 100,000 people in Queens.

Saturday could feel as hot as 109 degrees in the city with humidity factored in. But de Blasio and Con Ed agreed that the power grid is not likely to be overburdened on a summer weekend day when many New Yorkers will be out of town. Con Ed expects demand for power to hit 11,500 megawatts on Saturday, Drury said, well below the all-time record of 13,322 megawatts set on July 19, 2013.

Con Ed says it has spent $1.5 billion to shore up its overhead and underground electrical systems so it can meet demand for power on hot summer days. Drury said the utility can't predict what will happen over the weekend, but it will work to get power back on quickly for anyone who loses it.

"If outages arise then we’ll send crews and get customers back into service as quickly and efficiently as possible," he said. "Our goal is to keep the outages short in duration and confined geographically."