ConEd Worker Whose Home Was Hit By Sandy: "We're In Deep Shit"

Outside the ConEd building on Halloween, an engineer who said he’d been at the company for over forty years – and until the night before, had been at the office for nearly 24 hours – was smoking a cigarette. In terms of bringing power back to over seven hundred thousand people in the lower half of Manhattan and the rest of the city, there still wasn’t much to do but wait until various Sandy-damaged substations had been repaired, especially the one that exploded just a few blocks away. The company has now said that power to the island should be restored by Saturday, though some parts of the city would have to wait until mid-November.

He looked up north for a moment, toward the Chrysler Building, which was in a zone rumored to still have power. “We’re in deep shit,” Sam said of the situation. “We’re not prepared for something like this. You got a nine foot wave, twelve foot wave, fifteen foot wave. What’s this guy’s name on the news with the weather — he’s got a funny name, whatever his name is — that guy makes two to three hundred thousand dollars a year to tell us what the weather is, and they don’t even know!” The next day, the Mayor would make it clear that he thought climate change was at least partly to blame.

“Nobody predicted it would be that high,” ConEd spokesman Allan Drury said. Nearly one million ConEd customers would be without electricity in and near the city at one point — a record number for the country’s biggest electric utility. And the troubles didn’t stop after the storm. ConEd said problems to its high-voltage systems caused by the hurricane forced the utility to cut power to about 160,000 customers in Brooklyn and Staten Island on Tuesday night. It was a surge of water over the banks of the East River near the substation on 14th Street that caused one of the largest explosions on the New York City skyline in memory. The blinding flash killed electricity in that part of the city, and led ConEd to shut down more power networks in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn.

Now the challenge was getting that substation back online. “You don’t just turn on a 345 kV transformer,” explained Sam. This was not his real name. “It’s gotta be done right. It might take a week for you guys to have lights, but it could have taken three weeks. If we lost two or three transformers, it would have taken much longer.” Pieces for a new transformer system might require ConEd to shop out of state, and to transport them “on the biggest tractor trailer you’ve ever seen in your life.” And then there were all the downed power lines around the five boroughs and Westchester. Trees would have to be cut, lines re-errected. It might not be until the 11th that all power was restored. Breezy Point had been turned into a hellish wasteland. A freaking oil tanker had washed ashore on Staten Island.

The ConEd substation on 14th street exploding, as seen from across the East River in Williamsburg.

Right now, one of the biggest challenges to restoring power was traffic. With a surge of drivers, and without stop lights or enough traffic police to direct cars, just getting to work from Long Island took three hours. And while official ConEd vehicles were permitted to cross bridges the day before when other traffic had been blocked, he had heard of at least one engineer’s car being stopped at the Brooklyn Bridge by a zealous cop not pleased with his lack of ConEd credentials. “An hour and a half more before they could bring out drawings to the guys in the field, all because one cop wouldn’t let them go through. This is what you gotta work with. This is the bullshit.”

Meanwhile, he was contending with his own emergency: after returning home on Tuesday he discovered the first floor of his house in tatters, laid to waste by water that poured in waist deep. “If a drunken bar fight and a group if burglars came in and messed everything up — that’s what it looks like. Everything has been smashed. The TV is lying in pieces under the bed. The bureau ended up on top. I can’t get the insurance broker on the phone. My lawyer asked for the deed. I told him, ‘You can fish it out from the bottom of my house.’” Would he have a place to sleep tonight, if he had to stay? “I have a cot, but I’ll probably sleep on the floor.”

Photo: A Con Edison worker navigates the floodwaters in front of NYU Langone Medical Center (Michael Heiman / Getty Images / October 29, 2012)