FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: YONKERS MAYOR MIKE SPANO TO TESTIFY TO NEW YORK SENATE & ASSEMBLY ON NEGLIGENT RESPONSE BY UTILITY COMPANIES DURING TROPICAL STORM ISAIAS.
YONKERS, NY – August 20, 2020 – Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano today submitted his testimony to a joint committee of the New State Senate and Assembly on the negligent response of Con Edison during and after Tropical Storm Isaias.
According to Mayor Spano’s testimony, on the evening of the storm, August 4, over 12,000 Con Edison customers in Yonkers were left without power, with potentially more that did not report or appear on the outage map. The lack of immediate response by Con Ed left a significant number of customers without power for a week or more. Additionally, hundreds of downed trees resulted in a major strain on the public safety of Yonkers residents. As of August 11, exactly one week after the storm, nearly 1,000 Yonkers customers were still without power.
Mayor Spano states in his testimony, “Our Fire Department recorded approximately 230 calls for wires down on August 4, with 30 to 60 calls backed up during a 12 hour period. Normally if Con Ed cannot respond in a timely fashion to make repairs they will assign a wire sitter to ensure a potentially live wire does not constitute a hazard. This did not happen during this storm, meaning that our Fire and Police Departments had to perform this task as best they could, which severely compromised their ability to respond to other public safety calls. The Police Department and our call center reported another 150 situations. In at least two incidents, our Police Department had to guard downed wires for more than 30 hours because Con Ed did not show up. We had a school vandalized because the power was out
and the generator eventually ran out of fuel, leaving it dark and without security alarms.”
After previous storms that caused outages, Con Ed had made promises to train Yonkers Department of Public Works personnel as wire watchers. Mayor Spano remarks, “that training never occurred. This would be more efficient, and less expensive, than deploying fire and police officers to fulfill this function. Con Ed had stated in the past that local electrical contractors would assist with the process of identifying live wires and working with local DPW personnel. We saw no evidence of this.”
Mayor Spano suggests such negligence should result in a penalty to utility companies that are deficient in serving its customers:
“It is not enough to determine where Con Ed fell short and insist they do better next time. There must be a penalty. I believe Con Ed failed to take adequate measures, and failed to order mutual aid crews in time, because they wanted to save money. So we need to make them understand that when they try to save money by short changing the public, it will in fact cost them money. The financial penalty must be many times greater than the amount that Con Ed thought they could save. Then perhaps next time they will be more responsible.”
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