By Lincoln Anderson
Although some parts of Manhattan got electric power back relatively soon Friday morning following Thursday’s blackout, Lower Manhattan’s East Side was not so lucky and as Friday evening deepened fears grew in these neighborhoods of yet another frightening and uncomfortable night in the heat and dark.
Southbridge Towers and Hanover Sq. in the Financial District had power back as early as 6 a.m. Friday morning, while Battery Park City and Tribeca had electricity restored by 2:15 p.m. to 3 p.m. However, the Lower East Side, Chinatown and Noho — all part of the Cooper Sq. Network sub-grid — did not have power returned until 9:03 p.m. Friday evening.
Joe Petta, a Con Ed spokesperson, said there was no conscious decision made on the utility’s part to keep the East Side offline longer, but that the Cooper Sq. Network, which stretches from 14th St. to Park Row and from Broadway east to the East River, one of the city’s largest sub-grids in terms of geographic size, could only be turned on when sufficient power was available.
“It’s a very big network,” Petta said. “When electricity became available, it had to be matched with ability to move that electricity into any given area. A lot of these decisions were made for us. It was not anyone saying, ‘Let’s leave Cooper Sq. for last.’ In any process, someone’s going to be last and they’re going to be unhappy.”
Con Ed knows historically how much power each network needs. If less than the required amount of energy was sent to an area, equipment could be damaged, Petta said.
Four years ago, when the city was facing a summertime power overload, the Cooper Sq. Network and Washington Heights were shut down to save energy, causing blackouts in both areas. This time, however, Washington Heights was one of the first neighborhoods in Manhattan to be repowered on Friday morning, while Lower East Siders languished into Friday evening in the muggy temperatures and growing darkness.
The Con Ed Building at 14th St. and Irving Pl. itself only got power back at 7:30 p.m. Friday, since it is also part of the Cooper Sq. Network. The building was only somewhat dimly lit thanks to a backup generator.
“We were walking around here with flashlights,” Petta said.
Another factor was which substation got power first — if a West Side substation got power first, then it was more likely the West Side areas would be repowered earlier, he added.
Petta said that when Con Ed did have choices of where to send power, they looked at critical facilities, such as hospitals, and energized these grids first.
Meanwhile, as the East Side parts of his district continued to be blacked out while power had already been restored in other parts of Manhattan, Councilmember Alan Gerson was working closely with the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and the Housing Authority on an emergency plan. Gerson had been in contact with Con Ed, O.E.M. and Housing earlier in the day, but the talks grew more urgent as time wore on. Eventually, he found out that the Cooper Sq. Network would be the last to be repowered.
Under the plan that Gerson and O.E.M. worked out, emergency food and water trucks and portable light towers would be sent to key intersections, such as by public housing projects, like Smith Houses and Gourverneur Gardens and Land’s End 1 and 2, and large complexes, such as the 44-story Confucius Plaza, which like other high-rises was without water making it difficult for anyone, let alone seniors, to cope with the crisis. Any building over six stories needs water to be pumped up electrically, according to the Department of Buildings. Another location to be targeted was Park Row, where there are two developments, Chatham Green and Chatham Towers.
When the blackout hit, Gerson had been meeting with members of his senior housing task force at 250 Broadway and had to walk with them down 16 flights of stairs.
Gerson dealt with several emergencies throughout the day as they arose, such as getting E.M.S. to assist a woman in the Hernandez Houses on Allen St. whose asthma mister wasn’t functioning. Most of the day he was spot-checking for problems at major housing developments throughout the district, including touring the Two Bridges area, where he joined tenant leader Victor Papa. Gerson also dispatched his staff members throughout the district.
“I was on the phone through the day with high officials from Con Edison,” Gerson said. “Con Edison told me because it’s one of the largest sub-grids in the city, it takes longer to get it back on — and it’s unacceptable. There was a point in the afternoon, when they told me they couldn’t guarantee that they’d have the power back on by Friday night.”
That’s when Gerson’s emergency planning kicked in in earnest. He prepared the list of intersections that should be targeted for relief. Luckily, the plan didn’t have to be implemented as the power was restored, even as Gerson was on his way to the Lower East Side to deal with the crisis there.
Although tempers and temperatures have cooled following the blackout, during the ordeal the Downtown Express received several panicked and angry calls from local residents furious over the power outage — especially since the same power grid was victimized only four years ago.
Keith Crandell, a senior living in Noho who uses an electric wheelchair to get about, was angered when he heard Mayor Bloomberg announce that Shea Stadium was lit for a game Friday night while telling New Yorkers to conserve energy and while Crandell was still stuck in his dark loft. After 29 hours, “I was starting to get cabin fever,” he said. “I cursed Mayor Humbug, which is what I started calling him….” Crandell believes he was actually able to see the glow above Shea in the distance from his loft window, further galling him as he suffered in the swelter.
Marcia Lemmon, an activist on Ludlow St. on the Lower East Side who was disabled during the incident, unable to use the stairs and trapped in her apartment, was similarly annoyed at the neighborhood coming back online so late. She complained that there wasn’t enough help from more elected officials. However Brad Sussman, a representative from Borough President C. Virginia Fields office, eventually visited her personally to check on her and drop off some food. On Monday, Lemmon happily got her cable and Roadrunner Internet back. Lemmon said Gerson was the only local politician that she saw or heard from during the crisis.
“He was terrific,” Lemmon said of Gerson, though still fuming over the power outage. “It seems the Lower East Side, again, we’re treated like a ghetto. We were the last area to be restored.”
The source of the power failure was not, as initially reported in some media, the Con Edison power plant on E. 14th St. Some people had noticed that when the blackout hit, there was a boom at the 14th St. plant and a cloud of black smoke was released from the chimney. After some confusion as to where the problem originated, it was determined the Midwest was the culprit.
“That was a normal part of rapid shut down process,” Petta said of the black smoke at the E. 14th St. plant. “You have to clean the flues…. It’s nothing you wouldn’t expect in a gas-burning plant.” Relatively small, it is a steam plant, used to make hot water and provide air-conditioning. The plant is responsible for Stuyvesant Town’s hot water.
