Inhuman Swill

I'm trying out the new <lj-template> tag with this little video Laura took on Sunday afternoon. When your street is blocked off for blackout repairs, what else are you going to do but...

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When I was walking home from the subway last night, I rounded the corner to see ConEd crews working on my very own street. My pulse quickened. Before I reached home, a neighbor had called out to me that our power was back.

Indeed!

I ran around the apartment (after greeting the ecstatic pup) turning on everything. Then I turned most things back off, not wanting to tempt fate. I text-messaged Laura, who confessed to getting a little misty at the news.

This morning, I shaved for the first time in a week. There was light in the bathroom!

Then I paid some bills. The largest by far was our ConEd bill. That one is still sticking in my craw.

The first photo says it all:

Gothamist: Queens Blackout, Day 8

I'm afraid we're not surprised by this, but at least everyone seems to be paying attention now:

Queens Blackout May Last Through the Weekend

And it only took four days of complaining!

(Via Laura.)

ConEd's statement:

NEW YORK - Con Edison wants its customers in Northwest Queens to know that our crews are doing everything possible to restore power to its customers affected by the recent heat wave. The damage to our equipment was significant and extensive. We worked very closely with customers, businesses and city officials this week to ensure that outages weren't more widespread. We have hundreds of crews working around the clock in the area to assess the damage and repair many power cables, and will keep our customers updated as best as possible as to when full restorations will occur.

We appreciate their continued cooperation and patience during this difficult time. [that's the whole thing, really]

Ah, yes, that clears everything up. At least the mayor showed up to talk tough, as reported by the New York Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg held a news conference in Astoria Park to reassure residents that he was pressing Consolidated Edison to restore power and telling them he was sending hundreds of city workers to help them.

Some residents of the affected areas complained that the city has ignored a prolonged blackout that affected several neighborhoods in western Queens, which happens to be where most of the city's power plants are located....

Asked why it took him four days to visit the affected neighborhoods, survey the extent of the power losses and address the problem, Mr. Bloomberg said he was working closely with Con Edison, pressuring it to restore electricity.

Asked when power would be restored, he said by Sunday, if not earlier, but added, "This is a business where there are no guarantees."

As for why only Queens neighborhoods were affected, the mayor said Con Edison officials explained that 10 of the 22 feeder cables bringing power from the regional power grid to western Queens had been damaged, causing "a sort of cascading effect." Power surged into the remaining cables, overloading them.

He said all but three cables have been repaired, and power had been restored to major buildings, including the Citicorp building in Long Island City and on Rikers Island, which had to use emergency generators at one point.

"It sounds a bit archaic," the mayor said, explaining that 300 Con Edison teams would go through the affected neighborhoods, "opening every single manhole cover" to look for problems with electrical cables. They will also patrol streets looking for darkened houses, to find the areas still lacking power.

He said Con Edison would consider accepting an offer from the Long Island Power Authority to use some of its work crews.

Helen Marshall, the Queens borough president, said, "It’s ironic that people who can look at these generators, most of them from their windows, are suffering from this outage."  [full article]

We don't have it as bad as some. We have little or no power on the circuit to the front of the house, and none to any of the overhead lights, but we have enough power in the back of the house to keep the fridge and a small window A/C unit running, and it's only been this way since late Tuesday night. But still, the darkened neighborhood is eerie as hell at night, people are restless and impatient as the neighborhood simmers, there is still chaos at intersections where people don't know what how to proceed when traffic lights or switches aren't working, and the most frequently spotted activity of ConEd crews is standing around smoking.

I'm not the first to ask this, but I wonder how long it would have taken the mayor to show up and ConEd to restore power if this had been Manhattan? Or if ConEd incurred a power-loss penalty from Astoria like it no doubt does with the Citicorp building in Long Island City?

When you call ConEd today, they'll report an 8% voltage reduction in northwestern Queens. In our bit of Astoria, though, it's more like 8% voltage period.

For a couple of days now, throughout the heat wave, our power has flickered from time to time. We had pared our electricity usage down to bare essentials, like air conditioning and some lights. But last night, sometime between 11:00 and 11:30, the voltage fell drastically. Some appliances still ran, like the cheap digital clocks and the fan in the bedroom and the fluorescent light over the kitchen sink. But throughout most of our floor, there was not even enough power to run the lights. (The circuit breakers were all fine—I checked them.)

We sweated through the night with the windows open, though at least the thunderstorm last night had cooled things down. But there were lots of sirens.

By morning, a few of the incandescent lights showed a very faint orange glow if you turned them on. I called 311 and ConEd both, but got no helpful information. Laura took Ella out for a walk and gathered more helpful intelligence: electrical fires in the power lines all over our neighborhood. One man reported watching all the power lines for blocks around catch fire and burn. At 31st Avenue and about 44th Street, Laura herself saw a ConEd manhole cover in the street with black smoke pouring out it while it danced and popped and crackled. It was cordoned off and guarded by a cop.

So it's not just a problem at our local substation. It's the neighborhood electrical infrastructure that's been going up in smoke. We're lucky to have any power at all, I'm sure, but I wonder how long this is all going to take to get fixed, especially with more high-profile outages in Westchester and the Bronx.

(Don't even get me started on the nightmare that was the commute into the city this morning. Thanks to the power problems, the V wasn't even running from 71st Street in Queens to 2nd Avenue in Manhattan.)