For the second day in a row, Con Edison executives took heat for repeatedly failing New Yorkers this summer—albeit not as much heat experienced by the Con Ed customers hit by a power outage in the middle of a searing heat wave in July.
At a City Council hearing focused on the recent outages—including the July 21 blackout in southeast Brooklyn and the July 13 blackout that affected much of the West Side of Manhattan—councilmembers castigated the company for failing the city and for not doing enough to to hold itself accountable in the subsequent months.
ConEd reps defended their record.
"Emergencies are going to happen on electrical system when they run on peak," ConEd manager David DeSanti told the officials. "It happens in New York City and in every other city."
“There was significant failure here,” said Queens Councilmember Costa Constantinides countered. “You keep trying to defend this as if somehow the infrastructure is keeping up. But it’s not! You’re not here to celebrate a great job in July.”
On Tuesday, Con Ed president Tim Cawley was grilled for several hours by members of the New York State Legislature, who were trying to figure out what went wrong in July and what Con Ed will do to prevent more blackouts in the future. Cawley was conspicuously absent from Wednesday’s hearing, a fact that did not go unremarked during that event. “Tim Cawley should be here today,” said City Council Speaker Corey Johnson at one point. “I’m very disappointed he’s not here.”
In Cawley’s place, the company sent three Con Ed officials—DeSanti, Steve Parisi, and Kyle Kimball—to answer pointed questions and read a prepared statement. Those officials repeatedly emphasized Con Ed’s commitment to safety and reliability and insisted that pulling power from more than 30,000 Brooklyn residents was necessary to avoid a larger-scale blackout.
The most aggressive line of questioning came from Johnson, who launched into a lengthy speech excoriating Con Ed for its measly apologies and unruffled demeanor.
“There seems to be a total mismatch in the perception of yourself and the perception the public has of you,” Johnson said. “If I were you, I would be saying, ‘I am so effing sorry for what happened. This is embarrassing! This is terrible! We know that there are people in nursing homes and on ventilators and people that don’t have air conditioning.’ I don’t hear that.”
The speaker also deigned to offer some free public relations advice. “You need someone new to advise you on how to communicate with the public, because it is inadequate and laughable at this point. You should be saying, ‘Damn! We are sorry. We screwed up. We’re gonna say this in a way the public understands.’ I don’t hear that. It’s all this technical gobbledygook that most people and the public don’t understand.”
That “technical gobbledygook” was most apparent when the officials gave long-winded explications of the protective relay system failure that caused the Manhattan blackout. “When was the last time those cables were tested?” Johnson asked, growing frustrated when DeSanti said he would have to check the record: “These are basic questions. These are not complicated questions.” (Later, Parisi said the equipment had last been inspected in 2016.)
References to Con Ed’s equipment failures, particularly in heavily African-American neighborhoods of Brooklyn, seemed to be a sore spot for the company.
“What we really want to make a point of is we do not have a failing infrastructure,” DeSanti said, after a councilmember used that phrase.
"I think the statistics show it's not failing. It's not about a failing infrastructure story," Kimball insisted.
Councilmembers repeatedly raised the specter of climate change and of raising temperatures in future summers. When one official described the blackouts as “a unique set of circumstances,” Constantinides retorted: “But they’re not unique! It’s going to continue to get hotter… This is like the new normal!”
In particular, the utility company was asked why it’s been dragging its feet on completing a state-mandated study intended to assess how the city’s changing climate will affect its ongoing operations. The first chapter of that study, which was commissioned shortly after Hurricane Sandy, was due at the end of 2014. It never arrived. “What's causing the delay?” Johnson asked.
Kimball said that the first report would finally be published at the end of 2019; it’s unclear whether the councilmembers, or their state counterparts, plan to follow up to ensure that occurs.
During the hearing, Councilmember Justin Brannan, of Brooklyn, seemed unsettled by Con Ed’s lack of urgency on the subject. “By 2050, you’re gonna have almost 50 days a year that are above 90 degrees,” Brannan said. “You guys seem way too calm, for my blood pressure.”
