Mayor of N.Y. seeks inquiry after outages

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de

Blasio called for an investigation Monday of power outages that came at the end of this weekend’s oppressive heat, saying he no longer trusts utility Con Edison after it turned off power to thousands of customers.

About 30,000 customers in Brooklyn were taken off power Sunday so the utility could make repairs and prevent a bigger outage, de Blasio had said earlier.

On Monday, he offered a blistering assessment of that decision.

“This should not have happened,” he told reporters, “and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

De Blasio said the private company is “not accountable to the public in a way a public agency would be.”

“Con Ed is very haughty about this,” the mayor said. “They don’t give real answers, and they don’t feel they have to.”

The company defended its decision, saying in a statement to The Associated Press that it was “necessary to prevent longer outages to the impacted customers that would have occurred as a result of additional equipment damage.”

De Blasio’s remarks came as Con Ed was working to restore power to about 19,000 customers, many of them in southeast Brooklyn.

The utility said in a statement that it was working to restore power to everyone by the afternoon.

Like much of the East Coast, New York City experienced temperatures in the high 90s over the weekend — and felt much hotter with the humidity. Temperatures were starting to fall Monday, and city emergency management officials warned of thunderstorms.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he deployed 200 state troopers, 100 generators and 50 light towers to Brooklyn, as well as personnel and command vehicles from the state Office of Emergency management. He urged New Yorkers to check on neighbors, especially the elderly.