Power may again fizzle in NY sizzle
Con Edison is warning that New Yorkers may have to endure another blackout this weekend, when the temperature is expected to reach a sweltering 98 degrees — and feel like 106.
“We expect that there could be service outages — those things happen during heat waves,” company spokesman Mike Clendenin said Monday.
Later in the day, Con Ed further fueled fears of a possible power outage when it backtracked and blamed a flaw in a 13,000volt power cable that caught fire for triggering Saturday’s blackout.
On Sunday, company President Timothy Cawley (below) had called the idea of tying the incident to the failed cable “sort of a nonstarter.”
AccuWeather predicts four straight days of 90plus degree temperatures beginning Friday, with a 98-degree peak on Saturday, when humidity and other factors will make it feel even worse.
Last Saturday night’s power outage — which hit while temperatures in the city were merely in the low 80s — led Gov. Cuomo to threaten that the state might revoke Con Ed’s operating license because the company “does not have a franchise granted by God” and “can be replaced.”
During a TV appearance on the PIX11 Morning News, Clendinin brushed off that warning by claiming that Con Ed’s power grid “is probably better than any other” inn the US, and saying the company was “open to anyone’s ideas” for improvements.
“There’s a lot of patience and poise that New Yorkers displayed during the outage itself,” Clendenin said.
“The same kind of patience and diligence is gonna be needed as engineers and experts dive into the data and actually analyze how equipment tripped off, or what went wrong, that led to the large outage.”
By late Monday afternoon, the beleaguered utility — which is seeking to raise its rates for electricity and natural gas by 8.6 percent and 14.5 percent, respectively — finally said its “preliminary findings” traced the blackout to the cable that caught fire.
“In this case, primary and backup relay systems did not isolate a faulted 13,000-volt distribution cable at West 64th Street and West End Avenue,” it said in a statement