Lawmakers Lash Out At Con Ed Following Season's 1st Blackout
BY JOHN TOSCANO

Queens lawmakers were quick to react to this summer's first Con Ed power outage last week, expressing concern that the giant utility is still not capable of preventing other system failures.

Assemblymember Michael Gianaris blasted the power supplier as an "unreliable, unaccountable monopoly", Councilmember Peter Vallone charged "the same negligent, arrogant people" are running the company and Congressmember Carolyn Maloney saw the blackout as "an ominous sign for the rest of the summer".

Joining the three Astoria representatives, City Councilmember John Liu declared his constituents in Flushing, who had a brief blackout Friday night, "dread a repeat of last year's extreme outage in Western Queens".

Councilmember Dennis Gallagher (R- C, Middle Village), whose district also fell victim to a powerful storm that caused brief outages, stated there was grave concern in his area that the power failures might be forming a pattern.

Despite all the harsh criticism, Con Ed's chief executive, Kevin Burke, a veteran in dealing with these blackouts, declared: "The customers have a lot of confidence in us...they understand that problems could occur."

As he did during the protracted blackout in Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside and Elmhurst last August, Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed support for Con Ed and said, "We all want Con Ed to do a good job, and we've got to work with them."

When the 48-minute blackout in the West Bronx and Manhattan's Upper East Side was over late last Friday afternoon, Con Ed issued a statement attributing the problem to "a strong lightning strike in the vicinity of a Queens substation [in Astoria]" as the cause of Wednesday's power outage that affected 136,700 customers in the two boroughs.

"The lightning strike momentarily affected communication equipment that prompted circuit breakers on multiple transmission feeders to open, causing the service interruption," the statement explained.

Maloney (D- Queens/Manhattan), stated, "I understand that problems occur, but given last year's prolonged blackout, I am concerned that Con Edison still has not taken adequate measures to ensure that power outages are the exception, rather than the rule, during the summer months."

Vallone (D- Astoria) the day before the blackout at a council committee hearing had expressed doubts about Con Ed's ability to meet heavy power demands during the summer.

After the power failure, he promised, "We are going to be 'on them' all summer to make sure this doesn't happen again. Their strategy is to wait until something goes terribly wrong and then fix it. We have to make them responsible for maintaining their network before we end up in the dark ages."

Vallone, jointly with Gianaris, called for the state Public Service Commission to conduct an investigation into the Wednesday blackout.

Liu, speaking of the minor Flushing blackout on the first 90-plus degree day of the summer, said: "Unfortunately, this was somewhat predictable since the Flushing network of feeder cables has a failure rate comparable to that of the Long Island City network."