Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

The good thing about locating cables underground is that the city is largely immune to power outages during severe weather. The bad thing about locating cables underground is that it becomes difficult to figure out where the problem is once something goes wrong:

Consolidated Edison reported major progress yesterday in the week-old struggle to restore power to western Queens, but thousands faced a new workweek without electricity and frustrations boiled over as some officials called for a declaration of emergency and the resignation of the utility’s chief executive.

Kevin Burke, Con Ed’s chairman and chief executive, said at a 4 p.m. briefing that utility crews had restored power to nearly 16,000 of the approximately 25,000 customers affected by the blackout. In human terms, that meant that the lights, elevators, refrigerators and air-conditioners were back on for an estimated 64,000 of the 100,000 people who had suffered through the ordeal.

In an update last night, Chris Olert, a spokesman for the utility, said that by 5:45 p.m., service had been restored to more than 19,800 customers. That amounts to about 79,200 people, using a layman’s rule of thumb that counts four people for every “customer,” which could be a single home or an entire apartment building.

At a news conference at Con Edison’s headquarters in Manhattan, his second briefing of the weekend after five days of public silence, Mr. Burke said that Con Edison crews were working around the clock “street by street, manhole by manhole, to get all the customers back in service.”

The dwindling numbers suggested that the end might soon be in sight, but Con Edison has come under a barrage of criticism as having grossly underestimated the extent of the blackout, especially in the first few days.

Mr. Burke insisted that he could still provide no estimate of when full power might be restored to eight square miles of Astoria, Long Island City, Woodside, Sunnyside, Hunters Point and other sections. Underground cables had burned out in those areas, apparently overloaded by the utility’s decision to keep the power flowing to most of the 400,000 residents of western Queens despite the loss of 10 major feeder cables that power the area.

That decision meant that all of the area’s power was running through only 12 feeder cables, and through transformers and secondary cables that were not designed to take such a heavy load.

Mr. Burke said he had no explanation for why the 10 major cables went down while Con Edison’s 56 other feeder cable networks continued to work. The root cause of the blackout, one of the city’s most prolonged in decades, is under investigation by the utility itself and by the Queens district attorney’s office, the City Council and the state’s Public Service Commission.

See also: It’s More Or Less 2,000.

Throwing Urine Is An Ineffective Way To Protest The Forces Of Gentrification*

This is sort of like drenching the messenger:

Erich Fuchs is a real pisser, according to his landlord — and for that, he’s getting evicted from his prewar Upper West Side building.

The cantankerous tenant’s alleged penchant for tossing urine from his 10th-floor balcony has landed him in Housing Court in a dispute that illustrates tenants’ rising frustrations over a nerve-racking condo conversion under way at 230 Riverside Drive.

Built in the 1930, the elegant doorman building, with sweeping views of the Hudson, has recently gone through substantial renovations — changes that have made possible an $800,000 price tag for a one-bedroom apartment.

The redone lobby, which one resident dissed as “bordelloesque,” now features gleaming white mosaic tile and a new chandelier.

But the dust and noise from the construction has annoyed many of the rent-control tenants who moved there before Manhattan real estate went sky high.

And though tenants have been edgy over the changes, things never got physical until last September, when Fuchs began throwing urine and other things off his balcony onto construction workers, officials claim.

Though cops were called on several occasions, no charges were filed, the building’s lawyer said.

Last month, according to construction workers, Fuchs threw a bucket of urine off his balcony — drenching one of the workers.

“He hates the construction,” one building employee said. “He’s been battling it for a long time.”

The lawyer for the building management claims that by throwing urine at the workers, Fuchs violated his lease and is subject to eviction.

All of which points to the importance of reserving the right to toss urine out the window when signing one’s lease . . .

*For that you need a symbol — like Clinton, for example!

Moral Of The Story: Refrain From Lighting Up, No Matter How Long You Have To Wait For The 7

Smoking on the subway platform is dumb* but doing it when your name is on the terrorist watch list is just dumb luck:

A man on the national terrorist watch list was smoked out by a sharp-eyed undercover cop yesterday, The Post has learned.

Ashish Nayyar, an Indian national, was spotted puffing away on a cigarette by the plainclothes cop on the elevated No. 7 train platform at Queensboro Plaza around midnight Thursday, law-enforcement sources said.

The officer issued him a ticket for smoking. When he did a warrant check on the smoker’s name, he discovered Nayyar was on the terror watch list.

Nayyar had a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card on him from a relative who is on the force, police sources said.

He was brought first to a Transit Division holding area, where NYPD counterterrorism detectives and FBI agents interrogated him, the sources said. It was determined that the FBI in Texas had put Nayyar on the list.

Sources said Nayyar’s relative on the NYPD came down to the interrogation and got “huffy,” but left when he was told what the situation was.

Authorities had no photo or fingerprints on file to compare with Nayyar’s but were able to conclude he was the man on the watch list because he gave police information — his mother’s name and his hometown in India — that matched the data on the watch list.

After investigators confirmed his address and his employment, they decided that he was “not a player” in terrorism, a law-enforcement source said.

And it didn’t end there:

He was released into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for being in the United States illegally, sources said.

*You’d be surprised how many undercover cops seem to be looking out for this.

What Would Randy Cohen Do?

I wonder if he’d consider the practice of ripping off brokers a form of civil disobedience:

For some renters, the temptation is just too great.

With a broker’s help, they have found a perfectly suitable apartment. Then, depending on their moral compass, tolerance for risk and financial standing, they may be tempted to double back and try to close the deal alone — thereby saving 15 percent of a year’s rent, the fee typically charged by rental brokers in Manhattan.

With the median rent for a one-bedroom in a doorman building now at $2,450 a month, according to Citi Habitats, that $4,410 fee could buy a fine flat-screen television set.

An informal survey of Manhattan rental agencies confirms that while backdoor maneuvers remain rare, they are growing in what is the tightest rental market in more than a decade. Vacancy rates stand at a microcosmic 0.56 percent, and the number of apartments for which the owner pays the broker’s fee has dwindled. Surging rents are commensurately swelling the dollars-and-cents translation of 15 percent and the incentive to avoid paying a fee.

The risk of cheating the broker — who I suppose is not entirely a parasitic drain on the economy — can be severe if you’re dealing with one of the thuggier ones:

So if you are a renter with the stomach of a street fighter and the situational ethics of a reality-show contestant, what, exactly, are the risks of cheating on your broker?

They run the gamut from tribal to litigious.

“A broker can make a person’s life very miserable if they want to,” said David Francis Calderazzo, the director of leasing for William B. May Real Estate. “All you have to do is spread the word that these people are no good in the building, that they’re deadbeats. No one likes the cold shoulder.”

“A couple of years back,” said Mr. Calderazzo, a former actor, bartender and bouncer, “I showed an apartment to someone who was from one of my corporate accounts but had to pay his own fee. It was a $3,800 one-bedroom on the Upper West Side for him and his dog.”

The client dropped out of sight after looking at the apartment. But two months later, during a routine 411 check on vanished clients, Mr. Calderazzo discovered he had been double-crossed.

“I confronted him, and he basically hung up on me,” Mr. Calderazzo recalled. “Then, he calls me up two or three weeks later. He said he had to get his locks changed three times because someone put Krazy Glue in them. That the super and the doorman paid him no mind.

“It wasn’t me. I didn’t do anything. I believe in karma. But I know people in the building. He figured out maybe it’s because he didn’t pay me my fee. He mailed me a check for 15 percent ASAP.”

Honey, Did A Tomahawk Missile Just Spill Out Onto The Cross-Bronx?

Well now that’s odd:

Some would argue that there is nothing scarier than morning rush hour on the New England Thruway passing through the Bronx.

Throw a Tomahawk missile in the mix and you make it even scarier.

It happened to New Yorkers Friday when they found themselves nose to nose with a missile — that’s right, a missile — fell off a flat-bed truck on the thruway.

There was never any danger, however, as the missile wasn’t really a missile, just an inert, 18-foot long, 2,900 pound replica of the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile.

The real McCoy carries can hold a nuclear warhead and got rave reviews when it was first used — sans the warhead, of course — in Operation Desert Storm, in 1991.

The replica, it can now be told, is capable of slowing the morning rush hour to a crawl, as it did Friday.

The 4:47 a.m accident sent the NYPD Bob Squad racing to the scene, fearing the worst. But police quickly realized they were dealing with a replica.

“It just resembles a missile,” said Lt. John Gay, spokesman for the U.S. Navy. “It’s the same size,the same shape as a missile. We use it to train personnel how to load missiles onto submarines.”

By midday, the dupe was on its way to the police facility at Randalls Island. A Naval representative will arrange for transport to its home, a naval station in Norfolk, Va.

It had been at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a Research and testing facility in Newport, Rhode Island.

Its trip back south was scheduled to go through New York City, but as it neared the Hutchinson River Parkway entrance ramp the trailer carrying the missile stalled in the center lane and was rear-ended by a truck, police said.

The trailer then jackknifed and the case in which the missile was stored fell onto the roadway.