Pain in the Gas
Don’t blame disasters on lack of taxpayer cash
WHEN a gas explosion cratered two East Harlem apartment buildings last March, killing eight people, Mayor de Blasio knew whom to blame: Washington. “Our national government and the lack of support for infrastructure” were at fault, the mayor told reporters.
But Washington has now determined what caused this disaster. And it wasn’t a lack of federal cash.
It was incompetence— both by the city and by our forprofit power company — in dealing with the crowded tangle beneath our streets.
Almost everyone, last year, was jumping to the same conclusion. Blame the deaths on the feds’ disinterest in “crumbling infrastructure.”
The Huffington Post ran a piece off the horrific tragedy, with author Steven Cohen lamenting that “today’s national government could never design and construct anything like the interstate highway system.” Because of “antitax” sentiment, he said, many states “do not have the political will or the management capacity needed to build and maintain public infrastructure.”
That’s all fine — but, inconveniently, wrong. The National Transportation Safety Board released its conclusions last week.
The first “probable cause” of the explosion was Con Ed’s fault.
The problem was not a crumbling stretch of old infrastructure, but a defective piece of new infrastructure: a plastic joint that Con Ed installed in 2011. The “defective fusion joint . . . allowed natural gas to leak,” says the report.
The second “probable cause” was the city’s fault.
A broken sewer line had been leaking for eight years. So much water leaked out and weakened the ground that there wasn’t enough support for the gas line, which started to “sag” and “overstress” the defective joint.
If the city had “repaired the breach in the sewer main after it was discovered in 2006, damage to the street . . . would have been prevented,” the feds say, and probably the disaster, too.
Nowhere does the report mention public money— because neither of these causes has anything to do with a lack of government dollars— federal, state or local.
First, gas lines aren’t even public infrastructure. Con Ed is a private company — and doesn’t take any money fromthe government. Nor does it need or want to. When Con Ed needs money, it asks the state to raise power and gas rates. Last year, Con Ed invested more than half a billion dollars in the city’s gas infrastructure.
Con Ed wanted to do more — but Gov. Cuomo didn’t want the utility to raise rates. After Con Ed asked for a 2.5 percent hike, Cuomo made a big deal about freezing rates for three years starting last January, with his office saying it was a “clear victory for consumers and businesses.”
This is not the MTA, which depends on Albany. It has to do with a governor who has to turn everything into a publicrelations achievement— even when the issue has nothing to do with the tax dollars he controls. Butwhat about the city’s blame? Yes, the city’s environmental protection folk should have fixed that pipe. But it, too, had plenty of money to invest.
Money for water and sewer pipes doesn’t come out of your city taxes. It comes from a separate water bill you — or your landlord— pays.
And the city has raised water rates massively over the past 15 years. The city’s water company took in $ 3.7 billion last year, double what it got in 2005.
The city owned water company has borrowed a lot more, too. It owed $ 30.2 billion last year, up from $ 15.4 billion a decade ago.
Sure, there are a lot of projects for the water company to build. For decades now, we’ve been building a third water main to bring water into the city from up state reservoirs so that it can repair two water mains that are old and crumbling.
But the city’s water managers also make poor decisions. They said a decade ago that it would cost $ 1 billion to build a Bronx treatment plant with a pretty golf course on top of it, when it really cost $ 3.2 billion.
That’s a lot of leaking sewer lines they could’ve fixed.
If the pols can’t get the blame right, how can they get the infrastructure right?