ED Consolidated Edison Inc

By Katie Honan, Jimmy Vielkind and Ben Chapman 

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday said that he had lost faith in Consolidated Edison Inc., the utility powering most of New York City, after several heat-related outages in the past week.

The mayor said at a news conference that the state should consider whether a new entity should replace Con Edison, criticizing the utility for providing inconsistent information on the blackouts, including ones around the city on Sunday night that affected more than 50,000 customers.

The hardest-hit area was in southeastern Brooklyn, where the utility said at 8:30 p.m. Sunday that it had shut off power to 33,000 customers due to high usage during a heat wave. More than 12,000 customers in the city, including more than 5,000 in Brooklyn, were still without electricity by Monday afternoon.

"I can't trust them at this point because I'm not getting any real answers," the mayor said, calling for an investigation into the latest outages.

Mr. de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo had previously ordered investigations into a massive blackout that hit the West Side of Manhattan on July 13. That outage, which affected more than 72,000 customers, took five hours to fully fix. A faulty 13,000-volt cable on Manhattan's Upper West Side caused the blackout, according to Con Edison.

Mr. Cuomo called the latest outages "not acceptable" during a Monday morning public radio interview in Albany, N.Y. He said the state had a range of options for penalizing the utility, including the revocation of its franchise to operate.

"This is a franchise that is not granted by God -- it's granted by the people of the city, and you can change a utility company if they don't perform," Mr. Cuomo said on WAMC-FM.

A spokesman for Con Edison said that by Sunday at 6 p.m. the utility had reached record demand. It turned off power to the 33,000 customers in Brooklyn to prevent longer outages, he said. "If we had not acted as we did, more equipment would have been damaged, further delaying and complicating restoration," the spokesman said.

The utility said it has had repair crews in affected areas since Sunday night. A Con Edison engineer was also working out of the city's Office of Emergency Management headquarters to update officials on progress, according to the utility.

State law says that the Public Service Commission, a state board that regulates utilities, would have to conduct an investigation into Con Edison that found repeated violations demonstrating "a failure of such corporation to continue to provide safe and adequate service" to revoke the utility's license.

As part of that process, the PSC would identify "whether another person, firm or corporation is qualified, available, and prepared to provide alternative service that is adequate to serve the public convenience and necessity," according to state law.

The PSC is already conducting an investigation into the July 13 blackout in Manhattan. Mr. Cuomo said Sunday night that he had directed the PSC to expand its investigation to include the Brooklyn outages. The commission has previously probed the utility's response to ice storms that caused outages in Westchester County in 2018.

A PSC spokesman didn't comment on the governor's and mayor's remarks but confirmed it was investigating this weekend's outage.

Con Edison responded to more than 75,000 outages in the city during a heat wave that lasted from Friday through the weekend, according to the utility's spokesman. During that time, temperatures hovered near triple digits.

Sunday's blackouts came in the midst of a heat wave in which temperatures hovered near triple digits over the past few days. The blackouts were scattered around the city, including one area in Jamaica, Queens, where 8,000 customers were affected. The outages left residents sweltering and knocked out traffic lights, city officials said.

Eric Thorpe-Moscon, who lives on the border of south Brooklyn's Gravesend and Bath Beach neighborhoods, was without power for five hours Sunday night. Since he moved to the neighborhood in 2006, he has experienced three major blackouts, including one last week for a few hours.

But Mr. Thorpe-Moscon, 38 years old, also said he has experienced consistent power surges and brownouts. Con Edison has never fully explained to him why power will shut off for a few seconds and up to a minute, sometimes overnight, he said.

"I feel like there's something wrong with the grid," he said.

At the South Jamaica Houses, a public housing complex in Queens, residents said some of the buildings were without power for hours.

Malisa Blackmon, who lives on the fifth floor of a building in the complex, said power went out completely at around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday. Power came back on at 2:20 a.m. but flickered off again 10 minutes later, she said. Power wasn't restored for another hour, she said.

"I couldn't even keep the candles lit because it made me hotter just to look at them," she said.

Anne Maccaro, an Old Mill Basin resident, said power went out at her home between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday night. The 67-year-old bartender said the sweltering heat kept her up most of the night. She took three showers to cool off but only managed three hours of sleep.

"It makes you very angry," Ms. Maccaro said. "Con Ed has been in existence for years and yet they can't anticipate these things."

Write to Katie Honan at Katie.Honan@wsj.com, Jimmy Vielkind at Jimmy.Vielkind@wsj.com and Ben Chapman at Ben.Chapman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 22, 2019 16:54 ET (20:54 GMT)

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