Monday, July 24, 2006

Power Outage in NYC and Nobody Knows WHY??

About 25 years ago, the Bay View area took a 3+ day power outage. It was localized, but it took WEPCo quite a while to figure out what actually was the problem; seems that the "first fix" didn't fix it.

This one is even more interesting. It's affected 25,000 (or more) customers for a WEEK:

Utility officials and others said this power failure was perplexing, unlike previous blackouts that darkened large swaths of the city and were corrected in a day or two. This time, new problems have cropped up day after day: dozens of manhole fires, transformer fires and, most seriously, electrical cables’ burning out and needing replacement.

“This is a very strange phenomenon,” said Joe Flaherty, a consultant to Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America.


Chris Olert, a Con Edison spokesman, said, “We’ll take those cables that were damaged and analyze them, but until then, we won’t know what happened.”

The blackout has exposed an apparently serious weakness at the utility: its inability to measure the size of a problem.

Malkin thinks that Con Ed should get together with the FBI's terrorist detail...

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