Saturday afternoon, 72,000 ConEdison customers lost power in Manhattan, an outage that was not restored until some five hours later.
The cause of the outage is still unknown, meaning ConEd customers in the city may experience more in the coming days. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he and ConEd Chairman John McAvoy will be inspecting the transformer that caused the power failure.
According to CBS, Cuomo called the blackout “unacceptable” and called for “a better power system, better power grid. The system has to be designed with redundancies.”
The article states that ConEd spokesperson Michael Clendenin said, “This was simply equipment having a major trip out — what we call a ‘trip out,’ or a transmission disturbance — and the components that are in place to isolate and contain it did not do that. The breakers and other circuits that are morally set up to isolate something like a transmission disturbance weren’t able to stop it. So, for whatever reason, we’re going to get into exactly why.”
In a recent article, Bloomberg says New York’s top lawmakers are calling for probes into ConEd and the cause of the outage. In a statement Sunday, New York Senator Chuck Schumer said it’s “clear that the current undertakings by ConEd to maintain and improve the New York grid could benefit from additional independent oversight.” What specifically that oversight entails remains to be seen, however.
ConEd is continuing to investigate the root cause of the event.
