OEM to shun Con Ed numbers

New York City will no longer depend on Con Edison's estimates for customers without power to initialize its emergency relief efforts to areas that experience large-scale power outages.
Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Commissioner Joseph Bruno announced on Tuesday, August 22, that if the agency gets a call from Con Ed saying 1,000 customers are without power or if there is a significant impact, it would deploy its newly created Power Outage Response Team (PORT) with representatives from OEM, NYPD and FDNY to canvass the area.
&#8220I'm disappointed in the system they [Con Ed] used [to calculate the number of customers without power],” Bruno said. &#8220We are no longer accepting their numbers.”
During the 10-day blackout, Con Ed originally estimated the number of customers without power at less than 2,500 customers until the fourth day when that number soared to 25,000 customers (roughly 100,000 people).
At a joint Consumer Affairs and Public Safety Committees City Council hearing, Bruno also said that OEM is looking into utilizing real-time results for call volumes to the 311 system, which saw a spike in calls from 944 on the first day of the blackout to 4,800 calls on the third day, in order to estimate the customers without power.