NEW YORK – A brutal heat wave followed by torrential rain left New York City resembling a disaster zone Monday as thousands were left without power and major streets turned into lakes with waist deep water.
Infrastructure problems added to the chaos. A glitch on a subway line left rush-hour trains severely delayed and stations heaving with commuters. Many of those stations saw flood water pouring through the ceilings and down stairwells. Delays stretched into Tuesday morning.
The icing on the cake came on Tuesday when Con Edison’s outage map went down. Customers had no information about which neighborhoods still had no power and when it was expected to come back. A utility spokesman did say that 13,000 city customers still had no power Tuesday morning.
The perfect storm of brutal weather and failures saw Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo cast doubt on whether Con Edison could be trusted to continue to provide power to the city.
“The ultimate sanction is you could lose the franchise,” Cuomo said on WAMC’s “The Roundtable With Alan Chartock” Monday.
“If Con Edison cannot answer us on why these things are happening and what they’re going to do differently to stop them, then why are we depending on a private company for something so vital?” de Blasio said.
It’s estimated 50,000 customers lost power in Brooklyn Sunday. Hundreds more lost power as well as water in Kew Gardens, Queens.
But the mayor and governor didn’t mention the infrastructure failures that left city streets flooded Monday and the subway in such a mess.
Park Slope’s Fourth Avenue became a lake, while video showed a woman having to wade through waters at Wallabout Street and Throop Avenue in Williamsburg. Parts of the Long Island Expressway in Queens were shut down for more than an hour.
A switch problem near the Franklin Street subway station in Brooklyn caused massive disruption which stretched from Monday afternoon into Tuesday morning, while customers tweeted images of the floods deluging the system.
It comes a week after a man was almost washed onto tracks when flood waters broke through a wall at a Queens subway station.
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