Con Edison Customers Wait Days For Power to Come Back

By Katie Honan 

Consolidated Edison Inc. crews scrambled to fix outages affecting thousands of customers around New York City on Tuesday, including ones in which residents had been without electricity for two days.

The utility, which powers most of the city, said it has been dealing with scattered outages over the past week, the worst of which hit Sunday night, when more than 50,000 customers lost power because of record usage during a heat wave. While Con Edison worked to fix those blackouts, more outages came Monday night during a powerful rainstorm that led to flooding in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. About 13,000 customers lost power during the storm, the utility said.

By Tuesday morning, 3,500 customers were still without power due to the heat wave or the storm, according to Con Edison.

Marilyn Vazquez, a purchasing agent who lives in Old Mill Basin, Brooklyn, said in an interview Tuesday morning that she and her neighbors had been without electricity since 7 p.m. Sunday. Her neighborhood and other parts of southeast Brooklyn were the hardest hit in the outages. "It's extremely frustrating," she said.

Con Edison staffers told her she would get power back Tuesday, she said. But the utility previously estimated that the power would return at 11 a.m. Monday. Then it pushed the restoration time to 3 p.m. Monday, and then to 6 p.m. that day.

"There's no communication," she said. "It's terrible."

A spokesman for Con Edison said utility crews have been working around the clock to restore service. The utility has also invested billions of dollars to make its electric delivery system reliable and resilient, he said.

"Con Edison, like all New Yorkers is adapting to more frequent and severe weather events -- such as the intense heat wave we just experienced," the spokesman, Allan Drury, said in a statement.

New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, a Democrat, said at an unrelated news conference Tuesday that the utility should be fully investigated after a week of service disruptions that started with a massive blackout on the west side of Manhattan on July 13. That outage affected more than 72,000 customers and took five hours to fully fix.

"Con Ed's recent performance has been absolutely unacceptable, and New York City cannot afford for it to continue like this," he said. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, both Democrats, have also ordered their agencies to investigate the outages.

Kathy Vitiello said she partially lost power in her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment on Sunday afternoon. Power wasn't fully restored until Tuesday morning, she said.

Con Edison first said the power would be restored Sunday night, but it kept getting pushed back, she said.

"Every time they fixed one thing, two other things would arise and they had to send for more equipment," Ms. Vitiello said.

Some residents were also without water during the outage, she said.

"I understand things happen and it's a terrible inconvenience and you have to deal with it," she said. "My issue with Con Ed was the lack of transparency and communication."

Write to Katie Honan at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 23, 2019 18:45 ET (22:45 GMT)

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