8/11/2013
By Ivan Pereira
How ready is the city for the next blackout?
Ten years ago this Wednesday, eight states were hit by a historic outage, and 8.2 million New Yorkers were forced to live without electricity for 29 hours.
The city has had several other major outages in the past decade, but officials said lessons from ’03 have better equipped them to handle a future citywide incident.
“It’s almost a different world,” said Kelly McKinney, deputy commissioner for planning and preparedness for the city’s Office of Emergency Management. “We would use all of the tools, all of the operational strategies, if something like this would ever happen again.”
McKinney said power tops OEM’s priorities list and it is constantly working with Con Edison to make sure the electricity keeps flowing. Even though the Northeast blackout of 2003 was caused by a computer glitch at an Ohio utility company, Chris Olert, a Con Ed spokesman, said the company has invested millions and worked hard to make sure its infrastructure can handle the ever-growing demand.
The biggest blackout since ’03 was during superstorm Sandy, when hundreds of thousands of people lost electricity amid downed power lines and flooded transformers.
Aside from updating cables and moving them underground, the electric company subsequently updated several of its facilities with modern and more reliable equipment, such as waterproof transformers at its West Village plant that will replace the ones destroyed by the Oct. 29 storm.
Elected officials and residents said Sandy’s aftermath was a clear example of how the city and the utilities still had work to do. During City Council hearings following the superstorm, the utility was criticized for not upgrading its systems to handle such extreme emergencies.
Olert, however, said New Yorkers have benefited from Con Ed’s years of work — especially last month, when the heat wave caused the utility to hit a record peak, with 13,161 megawatts of usage.
“It’s a true testament to where we have come,” Olert said.
In addition, the New York Independent System Operator, which runs New York’s grid, is installing a network of sensors to provide more accurate readings of power outages and give operators time to adapt systems to prevent a power outage domino effect.
While no one can predict or prevent power problems despite the best technology, OEM officials said it is ready to handle any similar blackout. Following 9/11, McKinney said OEM started drills and operations for several scenarios, including blackouts.
And after the 2003 blackout, OEM came up with a plan that would allow interagency cooperation when the lights went down.
During the 2006 western Queens blackout, when more than 200,000 people had no power for 10 days, the city made sure that residents were safe, comfortable and kept up to date with the latest information.
“We had teams on the ground knocking on doors checking on senior citizens. We had health inspectors checking up on restaurants and telling them about spoiled food,” McKinney said.
In the past couple of years, OEM gained a critical tool: social media. Through Facebook and Twitter, it was able to communicate with residents in blacked-out zones during Sandy who were able to pick up the info and share it via their smartphones and tablets. “We will use every single resource we can,” McKinney said.
McKinney said he wasn’t surprised that New Yorkers bounced back.
“I happened to be in Times Square when the lights came back on,” he said. “All the people in the hotels were outside because it was hot, and when the lights came on it was great. It was a big cheer.”
(with Rebecca Ungarino)
