In blackout, Johnson shines, Blaz fi zzles
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
The big event on Saturday evening July 13
was supposed to be Day Two of the summer
version of “Manhattanhenge.” The sunset
would perfectly align with the borough’s east-west
cross streets, creating a golden canyon effect, and
everyone and her cousin would snap photos of it
and post them on social media.
Instead a massive blackout hit the West Side,
starting just after 6:45 p.m., and affecting roughly
72,000 Con Edison customers, according to the
utility. Power was eventually restored to all affected
areas, fi ve hours later, shortly before midnight.
The outage was initially confi ned to the blocks
west of Fifth Ave. between 42nd and 72nd Sts.
The New York Post reported that, by 9 p.m., the
affected area had spread down to W. 12th St. in the
Village, and police were telling motorists to avoid
the blocks between W. 12th and W. 72nd Sts. west
of Fifth Ave. The New York Times said the affected
area didn’t go south of W. 30th St.
By Monday, Con Edison’s investigation had concluded
that the “initiating event” of Saturday’s
blackout was an electrical cable fi re at W. 64th St.,
which, in turn, affected a substation on W. 49th
St.
“Our inspection of equipment and preliminary
review of system data over the past 40 hours indicates
that the relay-protection system at our W.
65th St. substation did not operate as designed,”
Con Ed said in a statement. “That system detects
electrical faults and directs circuit breakers to isolate
and de-energize those faults. The relay-protection
system is designed with redundancies to provide
high levels of reliability. In this case, primary
and backup relay systems did not isolate a faulted
13,000-volt distribution cable at W. 64th St. and
West End Ave.
“The failure of the protective relay systems ultimately
resulted in isolation of the fault at the W.
49th St. transmission substation, and the subsequent
loss of several electrical networks, starting
at 6:47 p.m.”
Helping New Yorkers remain calm through it all
was Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who regularly
tweeted out informative updates, earning major kudos
in the process. Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio
was pilloried for being out of town, in Iowa, on his
apparently quixotic presidential campaign, and for
issuing just one, fairly generic tweet in response to
the crisis.
Johnson, of course, also represents District 3,
which covers the West Side from the Village to Columbus
Circle, which bore the brunt of the blackout.
Nicole Gelinas, a Hell’s Kitchen resident and Post
columnist who lives near the problem substation,
tweeted: “Corey Johnson is in touch with everyone,
answering constituents’ concerned tweets, and
doing minute-to-minute updates on the radio and
Twitter where de Blasio is, like, where? Looking
for a plane out of place whose population is smaller
than people impacted by blackout.”
The mayor did not get back in town until 12:30
p.m. the next day, nearly 13 hours after electrical
service had been restored, according to reports.
Other media fi gures likewise spun the blackout
as a major moment for Johnson but another blot on
de Blasio’s record, adding to his reputation as an
“absentee mayor.”
Jessica Winter, executive editor of newyorker.
com, tweeted: “Corey Johnson is the mayor now.”
Indeed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might dismiss
Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and her “Twitter world” as being just a lot of hype.
But during the blackout, many really appreciated
and relied on Johnson’s tweets.
Ben Max, executive editor of Gotham Gazette,
praised Johnson’s Twitter skills, tweeting: “Given
AOC is in another stratosphere, no one in New
York politics comes even close to Corey Johnson in
understanding how important twitter can be.”
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10 July 25 - August 7, 2019 MEX Schneps Media
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