I want to give all New Yorkers an update on the situation with our electric grid. We’re here at OEM Command Post. It’s been active since last evening. I want to thank all of the first responders who did extraordinary work last night and overnight securing the situation here in communities in Brooklyn. And I am surrounded by leakers of key agencies – Emergency Management, NYPD, FDNY, including EMS of course, and the State Police. I want to thank all of them for all that they did and all that the members of their team did. So, let me give you some updates.
We’ve gotten information from Con Ed. I want to say at the outset, I am extremely disappointed with Con Ed. They have been giving us consistently inconsistent information over these last days. There’s a bigger problem here we have got to resolve with Con Ed because this was a situation we all saw coming, and they don’t have any good answers yet as to why this happened and why it was not prevented. But I’ll come to that again in a moment.
I will give you the information they are giving us but everyone should take it with a grain of salt at this point. Right now we have about 19,000 Con Ed customers without power citywide. About 13,000 of them are in this area of Brooklyn and that includes the neighborhoods of Canarsie, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, Flatlands, and part of East Flatbush. Because Con Ed chose to take this action to take these neighborhoods off the grid, to take their power away, we had to immediately deploy first responders to address the situation because Con Ed’s decision occurred just as it was getting dark which meant there were real safety and security issues that had to be addressed.
NYPD deployed over 200 additional officers to the area. I want to commend the NYPD and also the residents of the neighborhood for the way they handled things. As of this moment, the information we have in these affected neighborhoods in Brooklyn – there were no arrests, no summonses, no reports of any problems at all. More than half of the traffic lights, so far, have been restored. So, when this power was taken down it affected traffic lights, it affected streets lamps, but now more than half of the traffic lights have been restored. There are a number of additional traffic agents out to help traffic keep going until all the traffic lights are restored.
I want to thank our colleagues from the State Police. They did a great job. They came in and helped out quite a bit. I want to thank them for their cooperation and their involvement in helping to address this. I also want to thank FDNY for getting out not only in force to address any potential situations but proactively going to the homes of folks who are vulnerable. For example, folks who had breathing issues who were on ventilators and needed assistance to make sure that they were getting the help they needed. I also want to note that OEM set up an emergency shelter with Red Cross in case anybody needed to get to a safe location – thank them for that.
On the issue of Con Ed, whereas a week ago we had a situation that came out of nowhere, we still don’t even have answers from what happened a week ago Saturday in Manhattan. I have asked Con Ed repeatedly to tell us what happened, why it happened, how they are taking steps to make sure it won’t happen again. They have not given me a good answer. This situation in Brooklyn came at the very tail end of the heat emergency. So, obviously, Con Ed knew they were dealing with an extraordinary situation. Once again I spoke to the Con Ed president last night. I spoke to him this morning – no answers whatsoever as to why this happened and what is being done to ensure it will not happen again. This was obviously a predictable situation and therefore preventable.
What we’re getting continually is no clarity, no answers, no real timelines from Con Ed. So, at this point, you know, I said earlier in the week that I was having trouble trusting them. I can’t trust them at this point because I’m not getting any real answers and they have let New Yorkers down once again. It’s very clear there needs to be a full investigation into what happened not only last Saturday but what happened last night. It’s very clear we have to question whether Con Ed, as its structured now, can do the job going forward or whether we need to go to an entirely different approach. So, I’m calling for a full investigation and further that we examine whether we need a new entity to handle this situation going forward because at this point I do not have faith in Con Edison.
Con Ed is a private company that is heavily regulated but they are still a private company and they’re not accountable to the public in the way a public agency would be. You know, the Department of Environmental Protection provides water to the people of New York City. If at some point the water was shut off, we, the City government, would have to provide immediate answers. We’d have to show people that it was being fixed and we knew exactly why it happened and exactly how it would not happen again. Con Ed is very haughty about this. They don’t give real answers and they don’t feel they have to. So, I think it begs the question of whether a private company should continue to provide a service if they are not accountable to the public.
“Thousands of Con Edison customers are still without power. After two massive outages in eight days, New Yorkers are out of patience and have lost trust in Con Ed’s ability to provide a basic service. With severe storms tonight, we are mobilized in case even more New Yorkers lose power.
“City agencies are on the ground in affected neighborhoods in force to protect New Yorkers. In the hardest hit area of Brooklyn, we have deployed 200 NYPD personnel to patrol the streets and direct traffic, have 71 light towers ready to provide visibility throughout the night, and opened an emergency shelter for anyone in need. I have directed the First Deputy Mayor, Deputy Mayor for Operations, NYC Emergency Management and the Office of Sustainability to expand their ongoing review to include this weekend’s outages to get to the bottom of these failures.”
