Give Them Money!

The Con Edison multi-day power failure in northwestern Queens is simply OUTRAGEOUS!
Their response to the feeder cable failures which began on Sunday July 16 was abysmal, slow and simply INADEQUATE!
Con Ed's estimations of the number of customers affected were wholly inaccurate, bordering on being INCOMPETENT!
The city based its response on the information, or misinformation, it was receiving from Con Edison - as parts of Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, Hunters Point and Long Island City, sweltering in the heat wave that gripped our area, went dark and stayed blacked out!
This was not an act of God. It was not an errant lightning strike somewhere upstate or a reversed circuit in Ohio that caused the regional power grid to become unstable. The blackout was caused by long worn out feeder cables - infrastructure that should have been replaced - finally giving up the ghost and their ability to deliver electricity.
Con Ed should have been regularly replacing these worn out cables … but somehow, for some reason, they did not. Was it greed? Was it lack of information? Was it poor maintenance? Was it preventable? Only Con Edison knows and they don't seem to be telling.
Your old corporate slogan was &#8220Dig We Must!”
We say dig into your corporate coffers and give every single customer in the affected area a credit for at least $350 off their electric bills you send to them monthly. Forget about filing out forms and forget about non-existent receipts for food purchases. Invoke your new company motto just get &#8220ON IT” and do right by your consumers.
As far as businesses go … Con Edison's promise to provide up to $7,000 to replace lost food (with receipts, of course) but what about LOST BUSINESS?
A restaurant loses thousands of dollars a day at the cash register for every day without power. A grocery store loses tens of thousands a week if it cannot serve its customers. Diners, gas stations, banks, shoe stores, beauty salons, bakeries, pharmacies - all lost money - but not in just spoiled food!
Work out a generous cash compensation deal with all your business customers - especially those you ordered to stop using your power on Wednesday, July 19. $5,000 a day for larger users and $1,000 a day for smaller businesses sounds fair to us. Don't just loan businesses the money, send them checks immediately so that they can pay their basic expenses like salaries, insurance and rent. You should mail these checks out with every bill next month!
Con Edison must dig into its profits and get &#8220ON IT,” to right this wrong that it has been committed against the children, the parents, the elderly - all the residents, store owners, business managers - in the affected areas and do it quickly and willingly.
It is time for Con Edison to stop saying that they are sorry and show some compassion and corporate responsibility.
DO THE RIGHT THING. DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!