Con Edison Restores Power to Parts of Brooklyn During Heat Wave

By James Fanelli 

Consolidated Edison Inc. said Monday that it had restored power to half of its 33,000 customers in southeast Brooklyn who had suffered an outage during one of the hottest nights of the summer.

The utility, which powers most of New York City, said at 8:30 p.m. Sunday that it shut off power to the 33,000 customers due to high usage during a heat wave in which temperatures hovered near triple digits for days.

As of 10:20 p.m. Sunday, a total of 52,289 customers in the city, Yonkers and Westchester County were experiencing outages, according to Con Edison. The number was down to 19,919 by 6 a.m. Monday.

Con Edison said Monday that its crews had been in affected area since Sunday night and were repairing equipment. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was pushing the utility to get power back as fast as possible.

"It's still hot and people have a right to be frustrated," Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said on Twitter early Monday morning.

He said Con Edison had taken parts of Brooklyn out of service on Sunday night to prevent a bigger outage and to make repairs to failing equipment. About 8,000 Con Edison customers in Jamaica, Queens, were also without power, the mayor said.

New York Police Department officers were deployed Sunday night to neighborhoods in southeast Brooklyn to keep residents safe and to respond to any emergency, according to Mr. de Blasio.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday night that he was deploying 200 state troopers, 100 generators and 50 light towers in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Canarsie, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, Georgetown and Flatlands.

The governor and Mr. de Blasio had both already ordered investigations into a massive blackout that hit the West Side of Manhattan on July13. 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.

Mr. Cuomo said Sunday night that he had directed the State Department of Public Service to expand its investigation to include the Brooklyn outages as well.

"We have been through this situation with Con Ed time and again, and they should have been better prepared -- period," Gov. Cuomo said. "This was not a natural disaster; there is no excuse for what has happened in Brooklyn."

New York has been in the midst of a heat wave over the last few days, prompting the city to open cooling stations and extend pool and beach hours. Temperatures are expected to drop into the 80s on Monday.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 22, 2019 07:28 ET (11:28 GMT)

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