If We Run The Thing Full Blast It Won’t Get Anywhere Near 78 Anyway

Like we’ve said before, I’d be less likely to crank up the A/C as soon as I get home if the subway car on the ride home was properly cooled:

Mayor Bloomberg scolded New Yorkers yesterday for not doing enough to conserve energy in their homes, as the city remained in the grip of a stultifying heat wave.

“We think of the big buildings using the power. All of them have cut back,” Bloomberg said. “It’s in the residential neighborhoods — if we want to keep the power going, we’re all just going to have to conserve. I’ve done it in my house — please, I cannot stress enough, do it in yours.”

As temperatures soared to 100 degrees yesterday, Con Edison’s fragile energy grid mostly managed to hold, but there were scattered outages. Late yesterday, there were about 4,600 customers — approximately 18,000 people — without power.

. . .

Energy usage peaked at 13,141 megawatts at 5 p.m., which topped the 13,103 megawatts the company set at 5 p.m. on Monday, according to Con Ed spokesman Michael Clendenin.

New Yorkers also pushed the statewide demand for electricity to a new peak yesterday.

The Independent System Operator, which oversees the state power grid, reported a record 33,939 megawatts of average electricity usage between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., topping Tuesday’s late-afternoon peak by 60 megawatts.

. . .

Bloomberg lauded the managers of big office buildings for making great efforts to cut back on energy use, but noted usage peaked during evening hours — after people had returned home.

“We do need to be just as responsible at night in our homes,” he said. “Those are the hours when the strain on the power grid is at its greatest because people around the city are getting home, turning on the air conditioners, cooking appliances and televisions.”

Last night, as the night before, the Empire State Building’s tower lights were kept off to conform to Bloomberg’s guidelines to conserve energy.

The landmark building also reduced energy by dimming lights in public corridors and the observatory floor, and asked tenants to shut off lights in unused offices.

Bloomberg urged people to turn the thermostats on their air conditioners up, as temperatures were set to hit 99 degrees today before dipping into the low 90s tomorrow.

Relief is expected over the weekend, with temps dropping into the 80s.

“I know everybody would like to be cool, but 78 degrees is a lot better than it would be if we didn’t have any electricity,” he said. “I can tell you if everybody doesn’t cooperate, we aren’t going to [get through this].”

Cutting Off The A/C On The Subway Only Makes Me Want It More

Everywhere in the city people are doing their part by conserving electricity:

Trying to forestall the crippling — and potentially hazardous — effects of the fiercest heat wave of the summer, New York City undertook a range of preventive measures yesterday, from shutting off the colored lights on the Empire State Building, to limiting air-conditioning in the fancy seats of Yankee Stadium, to ordering some municipal buildings, like the Rikers Island jails, to use their generators.

As temperatures around the region reached as high as 100 degrees, and as the heat index, which takes humidity into account, climbed to 113, sweltering New Yorkers sent the daily demand for power to record highs, despite city efforts to conserve. And today’s forecast calls for even hotter weather.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg set in motion an array of plans to help those most at risk. Some 400 “cooling centers” were opened in New York. Public pools stayed open an hour later than usual, until 8 p.m. City hospitals were asked to top off the fuel in their generators, and while there were no reports of fatalities, or even serious injuries, due to the heat, it was unclear what the human cost of the heat wave would be. Across the city, nurses and social workers were sent to visit the homebound elderly.

“This is a very dangerous heat wave,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It really is more than just uncomfortable. It can seriously threaten your life.”

The city’s biggest employers, including stock exchanges, banks and tobacco companies, heeded requests from Consolidated Edison and the mayor to reduce power consumption by dimming lights and shutting down fountains and some elevators. Some switched to generators to lighten the load on the power grid.

. . .

At Citigroup’s headquarters on Park Avenue, one car in each elevator bank was taken out of service, and the air-conditioning was turned down. The big “Citi” sign atop the company’s tower in Long Island City, Queens, was switched off.

The torch and crown of the Statue of Liberty will remain illuminated so they are visible to pilots, but the lights in its base have been turned off. Thermostats in city buildings were set yesterday at 78 degrees, as they were at the main hall on Ellis Island and in buildings that are part of the sprawling Gateway National Recreation Area. Barry Sullivan, superintendent of the recreation area, said he gave his employees permission to wear “professional-looking shorts and short-sleeved button-down shirts sans ties.”

The AMC Empire 25 movie theater seemed to be following the mayor’s advice last night. What exactly do they think we paid $10.75 for? Movie theaters are the cooling centers of the middle class!

If You Live Along The 6 Train, The Headline Is “The No. 6 Is Rated No. 1 In Straphangers’ Report”

But if you live in Queens, the headline really should be “N and W Trains Suck Eggs On A Regular Basis”:

For commuters on the jam-packed No. 6 line in Manhattan, it may come as a shock. For the third year in a row, the line has been rated the best in the subway system.

Then there are the slow and crowded N and W lines, where announcements tend to sound like crackly gibberish. They tie for the worst lines.

These are some of the findings in this year’s edition of a wide-ranging annual subway system report card issued by the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. Released yesterday (and available at straphangers.org), the report relies on data for late 2005 from New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that runs the subways.

The Straphangers Campaign evaluates the various lines on how reliable the service is, the chances of finding a seat at peak times, cleanliness and the clarity of announcements.

. . .

The report yesterday found a wide variation in the frequency of scheduled service, which transit officials said was calibrated to reflect congestion and customer demand. During the morning rush, the report said, a train was scheduled to arrive at a station every 2 1/2 minutes on the No. 6 and No. 7 lines, while the intervals were as long as 10 minutes on the M and W lines.

Meanwhile, subway officials were on the defensive:

None of this sat well yesterday with New York City Transit, which said in a news release that the report demonstrated “a fundamental inability to understand how the New York City subway system actually works.”

Granted, but I think commuters fundamentally “get it” when three or four packed N or W trains blow by while you’re waiting at 36th Avenue in the morning . . .

Will The Outages Ever Cease?

Con Ed can’t get a break as the power goes out in Staten Island, affecting 16,000 “customers”*:

The latest power failure occurred as the utility and the city braced for a second summer heat wave that could endanger a fragile electrical network in Queens that is still being repaired.

The power failure on Staten Island began at 4:15 p.m. when three overhead lines were damaged — just 12 hours after Con Ed announced that electricity had been restored to the last customers in the Queens blackout. Around 10 p.m., Con Ed said, power was restored to all of its customers on Staten Island. The term “customer” includes residential and commercial buildings as well as households.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled plans to visit Queens last night to go instead to the affected areas of Staten Island. “The good news is the temperature is reasonably cool and we do expect to get everybody back very soon,” the mayor said last night in a news conference at Dongan Hills.

The mayor further noted the difference between above-ground and underground power lines:

He took care to distinguish between the power failure on Staten Island, which uses overhead lines, and the blackout in Queens, which relies mostly on underground networks.

“This is a very different situation than existed in Queens,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Here, when a cable is out, they know that everybody downstream is not getting power, so their estimates are very good. In an underground system, there are multiple paths to every house, so they don’t have a way of knowing.” In Queens it took Con Ed four days to correctly estimate the number of customers without power.

*And don’t let the terminology fool you — 16,000 customers could turn out to be a lot of people.

Community Leadership: Investigate, Federalize And Technologize To Solve All Problems

On the topic of grandstanding, Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. shows us how it’s done:

Astoria and Western Queens are slowly emerging from a hellish nightmare. We have stepped out of the Dark Ages. But of course Con Edison still remains outside the age of reason. Just like Baghdad Bob, they continue their laughable public misinformation campaign by trying to grossly minimize the extent of the damage they caused. First, they insisted that it was a minor problem with only a few hundred “customers” without power, then they raised that number to 1,800 and finally five days into the crisis they admit that 25,000 are without power.

That is why, my fellow citizens, I am calling on the district attorney to investigate the matter, requesting federal oversight of the utility and urging the power company to “use technology” to prevent this from happening in the future:

On Tuesday night I stood and watched electric power lines burn and fall to the ground. The fact that this was caused by two hot days in the summer is outrageous. I’m frightened to see what will happen in the hot summer days of August. Con Ed has assured us that they will be conducting their own investigation into this calamity. If this isn’t a case of the fox watching the henhouse I don’t know what is. That is why I along with Assembly Member Michael Gianaris and Council Member Eric Gioia have called for an investigation by District Attorney Richard Brown and will be conducting hearings at the City Council and the Assembly. Hopefully the “Con” in Con Edison will take on a new meaning.

Additionally, I am working with Congressman Joseph Crowley to get a federal monitor placed over Con Ed. The next few months will be crucial to rebuild our fragile network and ensure that this doesn’t happen again. I think we have all learned we can’t trust this irresponsible corporate neighbor, which provides us with stray voltage in the winter and no voltage in the summer, to do the right thing.

I am also demanding that Con Ed, like every other major utility provider, use technology that can show where service is down. It is embarrassing that in the 21st Century our utility provider must ride through the streets like a modern day Paul Revere looking for lights to see if power has returned.