Major Manhattan Power Outage, 40,000 affected.

(CNN) Tens of thousands of people were without power in Manhattan on Saturday evening, ConEdison said.

Of the 42,000 customers without power in New York, most of them were in Midtown Manhattan and the Upper West Side, the utility company said.

The city's fire department was responding to numerous transformer fires, the first of which occurred in Manhattan on West 64th Street and West End Avenue, officials said.

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CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/13/us/new-york-power-outages/index.html

Comes 42 years to the day after the infamous New York Blackout of 1977, which affected nearly all of New York City (not just parts of Manhattan) and lead to widespread looting, acts of arson, and the largest mass arrest in New York history.

The temps are sitting at about 85 degrees, which isn't like deadly but is certainly uncomfortable and makes me worry for the elderly.

The lack of coverage on weekends is pretty apparent. (Words of the massive cut in reporting staff at CNN are matched by CBS, NBC, etc... they all just wait for someone else to cover the story and the weekend coverage at local stations isn't that much greater.)

The blurb from Con Edison is deceptive. They mention 42,000 "customers" effected. That covers some pretty big venues... like all the theaters and movies that the Times Square area is famous for. Like Lincoln Center, like hundreds of restaurants and several dozen hotels. One "customer" alone.... the MTA, a.k.a. the subway, can impact hundreds of thousands of users. That area is still the entertainment and tourist hub of the city and on a Saturday night, I reckon there will be a whole lot of Instagram Moments sent back to Springfield.

Because the subway is electrified and almost every line in the city goes through one or another hub, subway service across the entire five boroughs will be effected. For locals, nice night to sit out on the stoop and play some dominoes.

I remember driving to the Palisades that night to look across the Hudson at the darkened city. It was super-eerie.

I was in exile in '77 but had been walking home from after-school something or other at dusk, at about 5:30 during the '65 blackout. (A.K.A. "The Big One")

'Bout fourteen hours later when the power was fully restored, the tri-state media went into an "Aren't We Wonderful" frenzy with stories about people pulling together to help each other. A whole lot of people, though, heard those accounts and noted that the emergency communications grid was down and cops couldn't get to problem areas if they didn't know about them. Many a "thug" or a "guido" commented, "Damn! If only I'd known!"

The '77 looting, I always assumed, was a whole lot of people who remembered the earlier missed opportunity.

There was a decent-sized blackout in 2003 that affected a lot of the NE.

It was mostly on Manhattan's West Side. From the Times' report:

Con Edison said that the power failed at 6:47 p.m. and that 73,000 customers were in the dark for at least three hours, mainly on the West Side. The blackout stretched from 72nd Street to the West 40s, and from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River. Link

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I think everything was back up by Midnight.

Some people were lucky.

May Martinez, 33, who lives in Inwood, said she got stuck on an A train when the power went out...Ms. Martinez said the lights and air conditioning remained on, but the train stopped.

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The ac was working? I would have stayed on the train until ordered off!

Some people were smart.

Ellie Shanahan, 23, was on the A train between 50th and 59th Streets when the train stopped unexpectedly. She waited with the other passengers for nearly 20 minutes before an M.T.A. worker announced that there was a power outage and that there would be no train service between 59th and 163rd Streets. After evacuating the subway station...he got on a Citi Bike and rode [home].

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My kind of gal!

The image is looking east. The Hudson River is on the bottom (the line of headlights are cars on the West Side Highway), W. 72nd Street is on the left, the Times Square area on the right.

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So there'll be a spike in the NY birth rate nine months from hence.

Possibly related, as the cause of the blackout is unknown.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was returning to the city after a presidential campaign stop in Iowa, said it appears the outage was the result of a mechanical problem in the electrical grid.
"This appears to be something that just went wrong in the way that they transmit power from one part of the city to another," he told CNN. "It sounds like it is addressable in a reasonable amount of time."
ConEd CEO John McAvoy said the company is working to understand the cause of the outage and needs to do a full engineering analysis.

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- https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/13/us/new-york-power-outages/index.html

5G antennae are being erected on street corners in NYC as we speak. I mention this because I just watched a video where Dr. Jack Kruse spoke of 5G testing in 2018 causing problems with the power grid. There were issues with jump conductance, apparently. See video at 19:00 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-kt3_oQ8ns#t=18m47s

A shot of a NYC street corner 5G installation can be seen in this video after the 1:07 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahsvlm4Mb7E#t=1m7s

Seems like this forum needs a thread on 5G. I can't find one. (On edit, I found a thread, but the headline cancels its efficacy. "Is 5G Technology Really A Health Risk?") Shall we start a new thread on the topic for an understanding of how the tech works?

I'm not defending Con Edison (the local utility), whom as a home owner I have fought with many times. But one clarification.

Con Edison said that the power failed at 6:47 p.m. and that 73,000 customers were in the dark for at least three hours, mainly on the West Side.

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When Con Ed refers to 'customers,' I'm pretty sure that is utility-speak for individual 'accounts.' In other words, what happens is, there is a major power interruption somewhere. The local news media very quickly contacts Con Ed's media office for information. With a major problem going on the media reps don't have time to 'guesstimate' how many people are in the effected area. Nor should they. That's a job for the civil authorities. When they say 'customers' they are really referring to the number of billable accounts in the effected area, not the number of people in the effected area. The number of billable accounts is probably something the media office can tabulate quickly.

Vixen said:

So there'll be a spike in the NY birth rate nine months from hence.

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Well, of course.... because people will believe anything that tickles their more salacious instincts.

newyorkguy said:

I'm not defending Con Edison (the local utility), whom as a home owner I have fought with many times. But one clarification.



When Con Ed refers to 'customers,' I'm pretty sure that is utility-speak for individual 'accounts.' In other words, what happens is, there is a major power interruption somewhere. The local news media very quickly contacts Con Ed's media office for information. With a major problem going on the media reps don't have time to 'guesstimate' how many people are in the effected area. Nor should they. That's a job for the civil authorities. When they say 'customers' they are really referring to the number of billable accounts in the effected area, not the number of people in the effected area. The number of billable accounts is probably something the media office can tabulate quickly.

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See Post #2.

MattNelson said:

Possibly related, as the cause of the blackout is unknown...5G antennae are being erected on street corners in NYC as we speak. I mention this because I just watched a video where Dr. Jack Kruse spoke of 5G testing in 2018 causing problems with the power grid. There were issues with jump conductance, apparently...

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The utilities have questions about the 5G systems but it seems to be related to adequate bandwidth and the fact the utilities use a lot of telecommunications to monitor and control their power networks. Below is a quote and a link to a recent Forbes article.

Two recent studies--one released by UTC that was prepared by the Joint Radio Company, and another released by the Electric Power Research Institute--unearth possible problems with 5G technologies, including but not limited to, cyberthreats to the electric grid, lack of infrastructure to accommodate the network of small cells and sensors needed to expand 5G access, lack of private networks, and potential health concerns since 5G microwave bands are 10 times the frequency of previous mobile devices. Link

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I'm sure Con Ed will determine what caused Saturday night's power failure, so we'll have to wait and see.

Con Edison says the problem that caused Saturday evening's power failure began with a 13,000 volt cable burning out under W. 65th Street and West End Avenue. Dark smoke billowing from a manhole at that location attracted the attention of people in the area but at first utility executives said such a routine problem was probably not the cause of the power failure. Now they say it was.

Con Edison’s president, Timothy Cawley, said in an interview on Monday that the fault in that cable set off a chain of failures in a system that is designed to contain and circumvent minor problems. At least two parts of the utility’s system failed to operate properly and keep the trouble from cascading from the Upper West Side to as far south as 30th Street, and from Fifth Avenue all the way west to the Hudson River, he said. news link

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Note they also say power was lost as far south as W. 30th Street, not the W. 40s as was originally reported. However, the power failure further downtown came several hours after the initial failure. One of the biggest casualties in that area was a Jennifer Lopez concert at Madison Square Garden (at W. 32nd Street and 7th Avenue). The arena went dark at about 9:30, about fifteen minutes into JLo's concert. Madison Square Garden sits atop Penn Station, but the station has backup generators and apparently continued to operate normally.