While The Limbo Is Over For Queens Residents The Mayor Dances The Electric Slide

Con Edison announced that power has been restored to the last of the Queens customers without electricity:

Consolidated Edison said early this morning that had restored electricity to all the customers who endured a blackout in an eight-square-mile chunk of northwest Queens for more than a week.

. . .

Some awoke Tuesday to discover that they had hot water and air-conditioning for the first time in eight days. By the evening, only about 100 customers were still entirely without power, and their service was restored overnight, Con Ed said. But anger lingered over how long it had taken Con Ed to reconnect everyone.

Meanwhile, the mayor glibly responds to those who were troubled by his thankfulness — basically, “it’s a free country”:

He declined to respond directly to criticism from Queens officials and residents who were upset by his praise of Con Ed and Mr. Burke. “We live in a country where you have the First Amendment,” the mayor said. “You have the right to say anything you want. What I’ve got to do is focus on what’s right for this city.”

Oh But You Should Have Seen This Neighborhood Before The Condo Conversions, Or Blight, Like Obscenity, Really Turns Some People On

The big question facing proponents of the Atlantic Yards project is how to convince people that an area with million-dollar homes can be “blighted”:

Of all the real estate jargon, bureaucratic buzzwords and plain old insults exchanged over the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, no term has evoked quite such unruly passion as “blighted.”

During the last two years, the word has hung like a scythe over the 22-acre site, most of it on the northern edge of the Prospect Heights neighborhood, where the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, hopes to build its $4.2 billion project.

For the developer, it is a fitting description of the abandoned auto-repair shops, collapsing brownstones and gloomy vacant lots that blemish the area, and of the eight-acre railyards that slice through the neighborhood just south of Atlantic Avenue. For many of the several hundred people who still live there, “blighted” is a term of abuse, one that ignores the sleek, recently renovated buildings on Pacific and Dean Streets, the bustling neighborhood bar, and other signs of revival. Even some supporters of the project, like Assemblyman Roger L. Green, disagree with the description.

“That neighborhood is not blighted,” Mr. Green, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said at a hearing last year. “I repeat, for the record, that neighborhood is not blighted.”

The long-running blight debate took a major turn in favor of Forest City Ratner last week, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s lead economic agency, formally declared the project site blighted. It was the first step in a process that could eventually allow Forest City to acquire, through eminent domain, the few remaining parcels that the company has not been able to acquire privately over the last few years.

But for all the freight the word carries around Prospect Heights these days, “blighted” is a word with no fixed definition, legal or colloquial.

It is not unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography — “I know it when I see it” — said Joseph M. Ryan, a land-use lawyer who has consulted for the development corporation before but has no involvement with the Atlantic Yards project. “Usually it’s a high crime rate, debilitated buildings. Often you’ll have pollution, or inadequate usage of land.”

Under past court rulings, for example, an area can be declared blighted even if particular parcels within it are not. Similarly, a given plot of land can be declared “underutilized” if what is built there is smaller or shorter than zoning laws would otherwise allow, even if the building in question is not dilapidated. Moreover, it is largely up to government officials to decide how prevalent a condition must be — how much crime, for instance — in order to label an area as blighted.

“There are no hard and fast rules regarding blight,” said Jessica Copen, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. “There’s a large area of subjectivity in evaluating the indicia of blight.”

You Didn’t Have To Squeeze It But You Did And I Thank You

Hizzoner gets in hot water (or lukewarm water, if your boiler is still out) after giving thanks to Con Edision during the waning moments of the massive blackout in Western Queens:

With Queens elected officials standing behind him, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg used a City Hall news briefing yesterday to forcefully defend the performance of Consolidated Edison in handling a power failure in western Queens that stretched into its eighth day.

The mayor’s comments appeared to surprise the officials, particularly when Mr. Bloomberg said Kevin M. Burke, chairman and chief executive of Con Edison, “deserves a thanks from the city.”

The Queens politicians openly shook their heads and rolled their eyes during the mayor’s remarks. He also said Con Edison had “done a very good job” in handling the power failure, which continued to affect thousands of people.

The mayor has been criticized more and more for his reaction to the power failures as they have dragged on, and yesterday his remarks drew surprisingly candid rebukes from the politicians who represent the affected area and appeared with Mr. Bloomberg at City Hall.

“I almost walked out,” City Councilman Eric N. Gioia said later. “I was shocked and disappointed by his defense of Kevin Burke today.”

What a scene — a posse of pissed-off politicians behind the mayor sputtering, “must grandstand . . . does not compute . . . must grandstand . . . does not compute.” If nothing else, Bloomberg seems like he has a sick sense of humor.

Meanwhile, had Con Ed preemptively shut down the power instead of keeping it going, four to five times as many Western Queens residents would have been in darkness (and without air conditioning and refrigeration and television and the internet and all those things that you take for granted while you have electricity), albeit for a much shorter time:

It was around 9 p.m. a week ago, on July 18. For nearly 24 hours, Consolidated Edison had been fighting to keep the power on in Queens. Six of the 22 feeder cables that distribute electricity to a half-million people in the western portion of the borough had failed. Then, in slightly more than a half-hour, four more feeders began to fail.

At a command center near Union Square in Manhattan, top managers at the utility had to choose: keep the power running and take the risk of causing more damage to the system, or shut down the network serving western and northern Queens, guaranteeing a wide blackout but one that could likely be resolved quickly.

“We were right there on the edge, thinking about whether to do this,” said John F. Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison. When the load eased slightly, he said, the worst seemed to have passed. “We made the decision to hold on, realizing the impact of shutting it down.”

So they kept the power on, the trouble spread, and eventually up to 100,000 residents of Queens were plunged into as long as eight days of sweltering darkness. Far more people, four to five times as many, would have lost power had the entire local network gone down, but the misery of the more limited blackout has lasted much longer than it probably would have in a controlled shutdown.

As a resident of Western Queens with power, I say thank you to Con Ed!

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.

The Thing About Electricity Is That It’s Really, Really, Really Important

Portions of Queens are heading into a fifth day without power — ironic when the neighborhoods affected are within walking distance of several major power plants:

Some residents of the affected areas complained that the city has ignored a prolonged blackout that affected several neighborhoods in western Queens, which happens to be where most of the city’s power plants are located.

. . .

Nowhere was the “so close, yet so far” sentiment more pronounced as at the Yellowbird Repair Shop, directly across 20th Avenue from the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria. Despite its proximity to the plant’s electric turbines, the repair shop, like thousands of homes and businesses in western Queens, remained largely without power yesterday.

“All they have to do is run an extension cord out to us and we’re open for business,” said Chris Kalatzis, the shop manager, adding that his house in Astoria was also without power, ruining $200 worth of food in his refrigerator.

. . .

In Queens, the system began to fail on Monday, the third day of a severe heat wave, and the failures were probably worsened by thunderstorms on Tuesday night.

In parts of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and other areas, there was substantial loss of food, loss of business and loss of cool. “Even third-world countries do not have this kind of problem,” said Jimmy Istavrof, 57, who owns the J & T Greek and Italian Deli on Ditmars Boulevard. “All this from a couple of 90-degree days.”

He showed how his Greek desserts and other foods sat spoiling in his freezers.

“You see? Like soup,” he said, squeezing a soft carton of ice cream. “It’s all going to shame.”

Dude, throw that stuff away!