Yesterday's fair amount of chaos across the city, from power outages to downed trees, from toppled Sukkot structures to bricks falling off buildings and the city closing down streets to deal with them. Some other stats and stories:
Yesterday's fair amount of chaos across the city, from power outages to downed trees, from toppled Sukkot structures to bricks falling off buildings and the city closing down streets to deal with them. Some other stats and stories:
The afternoon thunderstorms, which turned the sky above some parts of the city pitch black, have wreaked a bit of havoc: Not only was there flooding that closed certain Staten Island streets, over a thousand Con Ed customers on Staten Island are without power (before, the outage hit 2,500 customers). As for the mass transit commute, PATH service between the World Trade Center and Newark is suspended as is service between Newark and Journal Square, due to signal problems (according to the PATH, "Passengers in New York can take NJ Transit at Penn Station New York. Passengers in Newark Penn Station can take NJ Transit into New York Penn Station NJ Transit is cross honoring"). And for a little more weather fun, check out this video of a funnel cloud; it was taken in Wantage, NJ (according to Wiki, "If a funnel cloud touches the ground it becomes a tornado).
Last night, heavy storms and hail hit Westchester County, downing trees and utility poles and causing power outages to 17,000 customers. The downed power lines also prompted car fires. A Yonkers Fire Department official told 1010WINS, "Possibly a tornado came through the city...the northwest section...it was just devastating...trees and wires down...the amount of hail was unbelievable." (Reports of a tornado are still being confirmed.) WCBS 2 reports, "The dime-sized hail covered the roads in many areas across the city, posing as snow in July... The bizzare weather scene will most certainly cause problems for Wednesday's commute." According to Con Ed, Yonkers and Mount Vernon suffered the most outages while Bronxville, New Rochelle and Eastchester were also affected. Service may not be restored until later this afternoon. According to USA Today, "Hail forms when strong currents of rising air, known as updrafts, carry water droplets high enough in a thunderstorm for the water droplets to freeze... While hailstones are ice, hail is mostly a spring and summer phenomena because the strong thunderstorms needed to produce hail are much more common during warm weather."
Co-Op City, the massive co-op housing development (reportedly the largest in the world) in the Bronx, lost power over night. Con Ed says power was out at eight building and has been restored to six of them, and the other two buildings, per WCBS 880, "are being worked on and won't be back on until Saturday morning." Initially there was a fire, but that has been put out. Con Ed would also like you to know that they didn't cause it--apparently Co-Op City maintenance workers had been working on feeders, one of which tripped and cause the outage. WNBC reports that "there may be power in public areas, but not in apartments." People had been stuck in elevators and the FDNY was able to remove them. No injuries have been reported.
Two elevators inside the Empire State Building stopped working last night when construction workers accidentally cut power lines. Over five hundred tourists were stranded on the observation deck while more than a dozen were stuck in an elevator near the 80th floor for over an hour. Two women were injured when, witnesses said, they had to jump off the stuck lifts about a foot to the floor. Both were taken to the hospital.
By last night, power was restored to most customers in Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park and Park Slope who were hit by outages. All residents in those neighborhoods were asked to conserve energy by not using air-conditioners and other power-sucking appliances as "4 of the 12 big feeders...malfunctioned," due to "overheating or overloading." Con Ed worked throughout yesterday to return power to all but a few residential and commercial customers were still without power overnight. While Brooklyn residents can go back to using their AC, etc., here are tips on conserving energy (and saving money!).
Con Ed is asking residents in some parts of Brooklyn to stop using "non-essential appliances" (including air-conditioning) because of power line issues. The issues have left around 2,000 customers--and keep in mind a customer can be an entire apartment building--without power in Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, and Park Slope.
Con Ed has been working to restore power to customers in Brooklyn, Queens and Westchester County who are still without power after last night's storms (thousands were without power all over the region, served by various utilities). And recently, Con Ed has been sharing a website that maps power outages with the public.
The heat is on all across the Eastern Seaboard, and temperatures in New York City reached 96 degrees yesterday (just missing a record)--and it felt like even more with its densely-packed buildings and people. There were scattered power outages: Outages for 1,400 customers were reported by Con Ed, 788 by Long Island Power Authority (which had thousands on Monday), and 75,700 by PSE&G in NJ's Essex County.
Yesterday afternoon, a few manhole fires caused a load of problems for Brooklyn residents in the middle of a sweltering weekend.
Yesterday's windy weather has at least one casualty: According to WNBC, power lines in NJ. Jersey Central Power & Light's commercial power lines "fell across the tracks in Montville," prompting the Montclair-Boonton line to be closed for a while. The line is open again, but this means one-hour delays for the Northeast Corridor, NJ Coast and Raritan Valley lines. NJ Transit and Lakeland buses are honoring rail tickets.
Although the city was mostly spared, wind and rain caused quite a mess across the metro area last night. About twenty thousand homes lost power, including 900 in Queens and 300 in the Bronx.
Earlier this afternoon, an A/C power outage along the 7 line caused service to stop in both directions. Apparently one of the signals went out at 1:35PM, and the MTA wasn't completely sure when it would be fixed. Other parts of the 7 came back and now, thankfully, 7 service is back and running in time for the rush hour.
Thirty years ago tonight, New York City lost electricity when a Con Ed substation was hit by lightning strikes and a "cascading effect" caused the system to shut down around 9PM. And NYC, as well as parts of Westchester County, were powerless for over a day in the sweltering heart of the summer. Subways were stuck, mobs set fires and stores were looted.
Wednesday power woes weren't just for parts of the Bronx and Manhattan: Over 4,000 (or 8,000, depending on what you read) Queens residents were
Yesterday's thunderstorm left its mark around the area. Just under 2,000 homes were without power in the five boroughs (though, given Con Ed's counting, that could be many times more) while thousands of homes in Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut were also powerless. About an inch of rain fell in Central Park.
On May 25, 2006, there was a power outage along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor line, a heavily traveled route that stranded over a hundred trains from Amtrak, NJ Transit and other transit companies. Now, nine months later, Amtrak has revealed what went wrong - and it's a doozy. The NY Times reports:
A 4-year-old computer in Philadelphia failed to execute a single command given 36 hours earlier, after maintenance had been done on the evening of May 23, and then failed to alert human controllers that it had not followed instructions, according to an extensive investigation performed by outside experts. The effect was to limit the amount of power available in the system, leaving no margin during periods of peak demand.Continue reading "2006 Amtrak Outage Blamed On 4-Year-Old Computer"
Last year ended much as it began -warm, warm, warm. Last month was the third warmest December since records began in 1869. The average temperature in Central Park last year was 56.8 degrees, making 2006 the sixth warmest year on record. Seven of the city's ten warmest years have occurred since 1990.
With the weather turning quite brisk today, it's almost hard to remember that back in stifling July heat, many neighborhoods were without power for days and days. Almost. Yesterday, Con Ed released a 600 page report detailing what happened, why they decided not to shut down the network, and why trying to fix the problem caused delays. All in all, Con Ed is saying it wasn't really their fault - it was the equipment! Please, Con Ed needed 600 pages to come up with that excuse? Anyway, the NY Times summarizes what Con Ed says happened:
According to the report, three unrelated events on July 17 combined to knock out five feeders. The first event was a fire, around 3:50 p.m., that broke out in an underground conduit near 30th Avenue and 44th Street when a low-voltage secondary cable short-circuited. The fire damaged two of the primary feeders, causing both of them to fail in a 32-minute period. More than two hours later, at 6:48 p.m., a third feeder failed.Continue reading "Con Ed Blames Queens Blackout on Eqiupment, Not Itself"
The Office of Emergency Management has decided to stop relying on Con Ed-supplied information on power outages, after the July Queens blackout mess that affected about 300,000. OEM Commissioner Joseph Bruno said that the fact that Con Ed said only 1700 customers were without power on July 20, later raising it to 25,000 customers (and customers equal entire buildings, with indeterminate number of people in them), was cause for the city to start sending canvassers on the street to get better estimates. The "Power Outage Response Team" will be made up of NYPD, FDNY, and other city officials. Comissioner Bruno said, "We have never seen Con Ed be off by a factor of 10, as we’ve seen here... We are no longer accepting those [Con Ed] numbers as we had for years."
-- Some late breaking news: our sources at the Bronx Zoo are reporting a power outage. So if you're in the Bronx tonight, watch out-- bears get really ornery when they can't watch their evening television!
Yesterday was the third day of the August heat wave, but the sprinkling of rain in the early evening and cooler weather today and the weekend should hopefully bring relief to us all. And it looks like Con Ed managed to avoid a bigger blackout when feeder cables on the East Side failed and manholes exploded in the area as well; of course, Con Ed sending its own non-essential employees home certainly freaked everyone out! Bigger institutions, from hospitals to universities and performing venues - even the Bronx Zoo - switched to generators for power in order to conserve energy. However, some areas, such as in the Bronx, have been without power for days. Mayor Bloomberg is asking us to continue to conserve energy.