Fortunately my office is a few blocks north of my apartment. My Manhattan apartment, south of 39th Street has been
turned into the equivalent of a cave in Afghanistan.
Now pay attention, folks.
I blogged last night about the sorry joke it was when the
Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo, and the New York Transit Authority closed down
Manhattan 24 hours in advance of the hurricane. As usual, they were sweating
the small stuff and making a great show of over-caution for political purposes
while totally ignoring the big booby traps. For example?
Despite several recent crane disasters in Manhattan in
recent years, the Mayor forgot to check whether there were any cranes out there that should have been taken down before they began blowing in the wind. There was one. It’s a huge monster, twisting and waving in the
100 mph gusts, that caused the closing of a nearby hotel and forced several
hundred people out of their apartments in the midst of a hurricane. But even
that’s relatively small stuff.
Who's minding the power grid?
A major thing they forgot to do was check to see if there
was anybody competent minding the store at Con Edison, the local power utility.
While a few thousand New Yorkers were evacuated from water’s
edge apartment buildings in the Battery Park City area, near Wall Street, there
are now 1.9 million New Yorkers without
power.
Because of the way the city’s residential infrastructure is
set up, that means many New Yorkers, particularly the elderly, are trapped in
unheated apartments that are getting colder as the temperature drops. (Con
Edison supplies steam that heats many apartments. And even oil and gas-burning boilers need electrical power.) The residents have no hot
water. They have no cold water either, since water in New York high rises gets
pumped to water tanks on the roofs electrically for storage. They can’t flush
their toilets. They can’t bathe. They have to ration their drinking water. The
food in their dead refrigerators is rotting. Many have no phone service. Or
cable TV service. Or Internet. (Modems go down when the power goes down.)
If they have
flashlights, perhaps they can make their way down ten, or fifteen, or thirty
flights of stairs with a flashlight (and then up again to go home.)
But when they get to street level, there won’t be much there
for their solace. Most of the food stores south of 39th Street are now closed. Most of the
restaurants are now closed. The subway isn’t working yet. So even if stores want to open and have product to sell, there's nobody there to sell it. Or cook it.
“Redundancy? We don’t need
no stinking redundancy” – Con Ed
What’s the cause of all this? Somehow, a transformer blew up
somewhere in Manhattan. It may have been due to flooding from the storm. If may
have a wind-driven object that flew into the transformer. For all anybody
knows, it may have been sabotage.
Whatever the case, I’m sure al-Qeada took note last night
that you only have to blow out one transformer to plunge half of Manhattan (I’m guessing close to a
million people) into misery and paralyze the city. There seems to be no redundancy. No spare
transformer that kicks in when the old one kicks the bucket. There's no way of routing
current around the blown transformer, the way telephone companies used to
reroute signals around a failed communications node.
In effect Con Edison is saying, “So it’s busted. Tough
cookies.”
People will die
There are going to be people who die from this. People who
have heart attacks or strokes and can’t call for help because they have no
phone service. People who tumble down darkened stairwells. Even people who
starve to death in their own apartments.
Once the power is up, I do hope there will be some serious
governmental (and journalistic) investigation into why there is no redundancy
built into Con Edison’s power distribution system. And then I hope we get some
legislation to get it built. Fast.
Or, once the crisis is tamped down, will Governor Cuomo get
back to cultivating his presidential ambitions while Mr. Bloomberg takes off
for his getaway in Bermuda?
