Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good afternoon, everybody. The incident last night, which had a very big impact on a part of Manhattan, went on for about five hours. You’re going to hear in the course of this press conference a lot of detail about what we do know, about what happened, and how it proceeded, how it was addressed. I want to say up front, you’re going to hear a lot specifically from Con Ed, and they will tell you everything that they can confirm at this point. There’s a lot more information to come because we need to go through a very exhaustive, careful investigation to understand exactly what happened. So, I want to level set from the beginning. You’re going to get a lot of detail but there’s still a number of answers we’re going to need to make sure that something like this never happens again.
What we do know – and it’s not about the machinery – what we know, first of all, is the way that New Yorkers responded. New Yorkers are absolutely the strongest, the toughest, the most resilient of any people anywhere. And when adversity shows up, New Yorkers deal with it in an amazing way. So, as we saw – and we’ve seen it in other situations as well – people immediately looked out for each other, made sure that anyone who needed help was getting it. It was another moment to be proud of this city – the way people handled it. And thank God the incident last five hours only, but during those five hours New Yorkers distinguished themselves.
And also, crucial to say, and I’ll probably say it several times – our first responders did an absolutely exemplary job. Pressed into service in large numbers, very quickly, making sure that folks stuck in elevators were rescued, making sure that folks on those two subway trains were brought to safety, making sure that traffic was controlled. An amazing job by FDNY, NYPD, Emergency Management, DOT – so many agencies immediately deployed because they have been preparing for situations like this and they knew what to do and they brought a huge amount of personnel in to do it. But I want to thank all of our first responders. There’s a lot of people in this city very, very grateful to them right now for the exemplary effort yesterday.
Now, at this point, there’s something that’s important to say and it’s a very good thing. No injuries. No hospitalizations reported to this hour. We hope and pray it stays that way. Again, the exact duration, almost to the minute – five hours from the first incident becoming clear that it was something substantial until when all power was restored. There are no remaining disruptions to traffic or transit. Things are back to normal with both traffic and transit.
Very quickly, OEM, under its new leader who I’ll introduce in a moment stood up the command center. Key city officials, leaders of the first responder agencies gathered. The Elevator Task Force was activated. That is a pre-planned initiative to get people out of elevators. FDNY did that superbly with a large number of situations. The protocol to check on vulnerable people was activated. Because of the relatively short duration it wasn’t needed in any way in its fullest. But what we do now – and we learned this lesson during Sandy, during Hurricane Sandy – is we have lists of buildings where there’s people who need special help. That protocol was activated. Some people were reached and then the incident was over.
So, we, as in every situation, are going to fully analyze every detail, working with Con Edison. All pertinent City agencies are going to work closely with Con Edison to figure out exactly what happened, exactly how we can make sure it does not happen again. We’re also going to review all of the response to look for any lessons we can learn about how we can do that even better in the future.
Now, the investigation is going to look at the root cause but I want to say upfront the one thing that we are as certain as we can be at this moment about is this was not a cyber-attack and this was not act of physical terrorism. When I got the news, the first calls I placed were to Commissioner O’Neill and to Commissioner Criswell, and they quickly confirmed not just on behalf of the NYPD but on behalf of our federal security partners that there was no evidence whatsoever of any nefarious activity in this situation.
I was just at the Con Ed Diagnostic and Restoration Center. They have done a very good job moving quickly to secure the situation. I want to thank everyone at Con Ed for their quick efforts here. They are going to be part of systematically trying to understand exactly what happened so, again, we can avoid it in the future and we will assist in every way.
I am mindful that this happened at a point where there was relatively low energy usage in the city. And that’s one of the other things you’ll hear from President Cawley but that’s one of the things that does not look like the cause. It was not a massive energy need, electricity need driving this. It was actually a pretty low level amount of energy being used yesterday compared to some other times. We’re very mindful that later this coming week it’s going to get up into the 90s. We’re going to work closely with Con Ed to make sure all the redundancy is in place to ensure that as it gets hotter Con Ed’s going to be able to handle that.
Commissioner Deanne Criswell, Emergency Management: Thank you, Mayor. Good afternoon, everybody. Again, my name is Deanne Criswell, and just a little bit of an update of the things that we did yesterday. So, as you heard it started at 6:47 pm and by just before midnight we did have all power restored. We did show that there was at a peak just close to 73,000 customers that were without power within six networks. And MTA subway lines did face multiple service disruptions but they all have been restored. All of the traffic signals have been restored and one hospital, Mount Sinai West, was also in the area that was impacted but they did quickly switch to generator power and they are now back on grid power.
What we did was we activated our Emergency Operations Center and we brought in 20 representatives from City agencies to work in the Emergency Operations Center through the night and into the morning until we had confirmation from Con Ed that the system had been stable. We also brought out our Incident Command Center where we were able to coordinate here on scene to make sure we were sharing information in a timely manner.
As it is right now, all systems have been restored. We have gone back to normal operations. All of our personnel are still monitoring and we’re working closely with Con Ed as they continue to look into the cause of this and making sure that if anything does happen through the next week that we are prepared to respond as well.
Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill: Good afternoon, everybody. So, at 18:47, that’s when we were first notified. We did a mobilization so we brought additional police officers into the affected areas. Initially it was the 2-0 and parts of Midtown South. That composed – in the end, ended up deploying over 400 police officers, 16 of them being from our Emergency Services Unit. They were part of the Elevator Task Force. We brought in, also, an additional 100 traffic agents. 9-11 initially, there was a little bit of a problem, there was a little bit of a backup, a more than 30 second delay, but that was cleared up by 2000 hours. As the Mayor spoke about, there were two trains that needed assistance getting into the stations. One being 8-6 and Broadway, and one being 5-9 and Columbus – and that was affected about 2,800 passengers.
We had a major event obviously in Madison Square Garden, and working with Madison Square Garden personnel we were able to safely evacuate everybody else from that event. The only issue is that we did have to pull resources from around the city. We did bring in Strategic Response Group, Critical Response Command, but we also brought in a car from each precinct from around the city. So that’s a little bit of an issue on a busy Saturday night for us but power was restored and everybody was sent back to their commands after midnight. Thank you very much.
No, we deployed pretty quickly. Every borough, every precinct has a plan – a blackout plan. We have a number of different plans, and it's going to take a little bit of time, especially if we’re bringing people all over the City. So, I appreciate New York and I appreciate New Yorkers. And when it’s happened in past, people stepped up to the plate, helped to keep traffic moving. So, I just want to thank all New Yorkers for last night. We got through safely and I want to thank to men and women in the NYPD for doing another terrific job.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro: Thank you. As you can see around us, we live in a vertical city and especially where this was affected most is a particularly vertical part of the city. So we had more than 400 stuck elevators when this occurred and our – the efforts of the Fire Department members, NYPD, ESU, we were able to get people out of each and every one of those elevators and some of them were quite difficult involving breaching and blind shafts. But everyone was removed safely. Calls spiked, as Commissioner O’Neill said, as soon as this happened. We noticed that call spike. We brought in fire apparatus, EMS units from our other boroughs. We held EMS units over that were going off tours and at the height of this we had 93 additional ambulances here in Manhattan to handle the call volume so that by the time this event ended, there was only one call in the city holding which is less than on a typical Saturday night. So, I think our members reacted quite quickly, they reacted quite well, and they took care of the people in this area of the city and thankfully it was all over by midnight.
President Tim Cawley, Con Edison: Good afternoon, all. So, I’ll start off by saying we sincerely regret the power disruption and the impact it had on the lives and businesses of the people of this great city. I’ll talk a little bit about the event, how the restoration went, and then importantly, the actions we’ll take to understand why it happened really in effort to reduce the likelihood moving forward.
So, as was mentioned – 6:47 pm last night our operators, the system saw at our West Side Transmission Station a number of breakers open up effectively de-energizing the neighborhoods surrounding that West Side station. And in reaction to that, we go about first understanding what the status of the condition is and then developing a restoration path to get the customers back in lights. So, that involves both inspections of substations and other equipment, a quick visual inspection to what the nature of the equipment is, and more importantly we do a lot of data analysis. There’s relays and voltage and current readings and we put that together, we can understand what equipment is healthy and is ready to go back and what equipment is more questionable to go back.
And the robustness of the system particularly at this time of year in the weekend in Manhattan is that we don’t need to restore all of the equipment to restore all of the customers. So, we – after going through that analysis, we established a path back and by a little after 11:30 pm last night we were able to restore all six of those networks and 72,000 customers.
We left off some equipment that requires additional testing before we see its fit for service and fit for duty and some of that equipment may need repairs. Notwithstanding the fact that some of that equipment in a few cases might need repair, the cascading or sort of the widespread nature of the failure is really what we’re going to dig into on the root cause analysis. So, we’ll understand how individual equipment components operated but more importantly we’ll understand the dynamic of the grid and why a failure – if it turns out to be – on one component led to a much wider impact on the system
So last night the focus until just before midnight was assess the damage, determine a restoration path back, and execute on that path. And like I said in a little less than five hours we accomplished that. We immediately turned to lessons learned analysis, understanding with reams of data what the system configuration was at the time of the incident and sort of back casting and learning what was the key driver and how could we prevent it moving forward.
That will take some time to do. I can tell you we know some things, as was mentioned. We have no indication at all that this was involved in cyber in any way or a physical attack. In terms of loading or demand on the system, it was a warm evening last night but in terms of the peak demands that Manhattan exhibits on those hottest weekdays, the demand was very low. So, loading of equipment was not an issue at all. In fact, as I said we were able to restore all the customers while leaving some equipment out of service. So, we’ll really focus on that lesson learned analysis.
I want to especially thank the emergency responders, many of whom are represented here and our employees who worked diligently to restore the power. And equally, I’d like to thank New Yorkers – calm, poised, through a very difficult situation. We understand what that is and really appreciate the maturity with which New York approached it with calm and poise. The collaborative effort with the State and the City was really what it should be and allowed us to provide the restoration that we did. Thank you.
Mayor de Blasio: No, it's a combination of things. First, again, understanding is this something that's going to be resolved immediately or not. It was knowing that it was going to take quite a while to get back, so I was going to have to provide guidance wherever I was, which is what any leader has to do, and I was doing that with conversations directly with the Police Commissioner, with my Chief of Staff, with Commissioner Criswell. I want people understand that this job, and any public CEO today, you have to take charge wherever you are, and I did that. But in terms of the decision, as soon as it became clear we did not have an immediately resolvable crisis, I started moving.
President Tim Cawley, Con Edison: Yeah, so there would be theories. I can tell you that the failed circuit is a 13,000-volt feeder. They fail – we have a lot of them and they, they fail on occasion, and we have a lot of maintenance and replacement programs in place to mitigate that, to sort of identify where the most risky areas – the riskiest areas are. But really, to think a 13 KV feeder translate to the transmission system is sort of a nonstarter. Our team will look at everything, because it happened in and around the time. But it might – the reverse potentially could be true, but that being the cause of the backup to the transmission system is really a nonstarter.
Yeah, and that's the distribution circuit failure that I talked about. So, when that fails, sometimes there's an arc and a flash. To have that cause the [inaudible] power system is really a nonstarter. It's possible that – possible, that the loss of the grid might've caused something to happen as that was happening, but it wouldn't back up that way.
I don't have the details on the impact, but the MTA system, like other systems, if they lose power and a part of their auxiliary systems rely on power, they're going to be impacted. And I think that's what happened. We've done some investment in the MTA and I think it's yielded good results. We've upgraded infrastructure, feeding those services. We've set up a location where we could quickly connect emergency generators in short order under a contingency. So, I don't have the details, but if you have a widespread power outage and systems rely on power, you're going to have impact.
So, in 2003, there was the big northeast blackout, and that started elsewhere and impacted us, not really our grid, and we had to restore there. The last event that was like this, I think was 2006 for less than two hours customers in – the event started in Queens, and it was basically a relaying operation where breakers opened too aggressively and isolated customers for about 90 minutes. So, from 2006 to today – you know, 13 years – we haven't had this happen. It's one of the things we try to design for both with capacity and resiliency in our designs. And so, we think the grid is sound. We are certainly going to learn everything we can about this event, and if there are lessons learned that we can apply moving forward, we will.
So, it ranges from transformers, to auxiliary equipment on transformers. And this is really – on the initial pass, in those first few hours, the operators and technicians are pulling in data and assessments from the field on the physical look of the equipment and saying this stuff is all good to go back based on the data and the visual. This may be good to go back, but we don't need it, so let's pursue this path. And, as a result, we got the lights back on by midnight.
So, what we know now is that a large transmission substation, that is basically a ring bus – a ring that feeds out to these neighborhoods that were impacted – that transmission substation, large portions of it became de-energized. And when that substation became de-energized, it had no ability to serve those neighborhood networks. So we had to restore that ring at the major substation. What we are going to go after in our root-cause analysis is why did that ring bus, that major transmission distributor open up and fail last night at 8:37 – 6:37. Midtown on the West Side. It's at 49th Street.
Senior Vice President of Central Operations Milo Blair, Con Edison: I'm Milo Blair, I’m the Senior VP of Central Ops, responsible for electric transmission. It extended from 30th Street on the south to 72nd Street from Fifth Avenue – some parts of the Fifth Avenue and back to the [inaudible]. So, all the folks that the area was affected. But, as you said, it was 70,000-meter customers. So, anyone in that area at that particular time – 30th to 72nd, Fifth Avenue to the river.
