NYC utility prepped for big storm, got bigger one
Streets around a Con Edison substation flooded Monday as the East River overflowed into the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, N.Y., as Hurricane Sandy moved through the area.
Workers clear debris outside the Consolidated Edison power substation on 14th Street. After a gigantic wall of water defied elaborate planning and swamped underground electrical equipment at a Consolidated Edison substation in Manhattan’s East Village, about 250,000 lower Manhattan customers were left without power.
Transformers appear to explode after much of lower Manhattan lost power during Hurricane Sandy in New York.
NEW YORK – They planned big for Superstorm Sandy, but not big enough.Consolidated Edison figured any surge would not surpass the 11-foot record set nearly two centuries ago. Or the design limit of 12.5 feet for a key substation in lower Manhattan.But the wall of seawater reached 14 feet.The surge that swamped the substation cut power to about 250,000 customers. It was the signature event in a series of electrical failures from winds and floods that at one point left almost 1 million Con Ed customers in the dark – a record storm outage for the utility.Con Ed planners knew by Monday evening that they would face an extraordinary mix of threats to their electrical network: a historically powerful storm, a very high tide driven by a full moon, critical electrical equipment buried under the streets, and full-force exposure to the intensity of the elements via New York Harbor, the Atlantic estuary known as the East River, and other waterways. So they prepared for a rough go.But events defied elaborate planning and expectations.The substation, located near the East River in the southeast portion of Manhattan, had withstood a surge of 9.5 feet during last year’s Hurricane Irene. The utility figured the infrastructure also could handle a repeat of the highest surge on record for the area: 11 feet during a hurricane in 1821, according to the National Weather Service. They also did not expect the design limit of 12.5 feet to be threatened.But as water poured into the substation Monday evening, the blinding flash of an explosion lit the most famous skyline in the world, then plunged the bottom third of Manhattan into darkness.”Nobody predicted it would be that high,” said Con Ed spokesman Allan Drury. A proactive Con Ed had hoped to avoid disaster by shutting down three similar power networks in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn in advance of the storm surge. As the storm’s predicted path zeroed in on the New York metropolitan area, Con Ed brought on extra work crews and laid plans to shut down some underground equipment in lower Manhattan and other parts of the city. By late Monday afternoon, the utility started to notify Manhattan customers south of 36th Street – an area encompassing nearly a third of Manhattan – that power might be shut off if underground equipment was flooded with corrosive, destructive seawater. The company gave the same heads-up to some customers in outlying Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. By mid-evening, though, conditions had worsened. More than 150,000 customers in New York City and the northern county of Westchester were already off grid. The utility began turning off the power, as a precaution, to a section of lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, in an attempt to stem damage. Shortly afterward, the company began cutting electricity in parts of Brooklyn too; a total of 220,000 other customers were already in the dark. Less than an hour later, more equipment flooded, sparks flew, and the blast boomed across the East River – Manhattan’s eastern border – and throughout lower Manhattan from what Con Ed believes was a circuit breaker at its flooded substation. The flooded equipment had failed. When live electric equipment is inundated with salt water, electricity escapes every which way, sending sparks flying and damaging equipment. “You see a huge blast just from the short circuit,” says Arshad Mansoor, senior vice president for research and development at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded research group. And the troubles didn’t end as the storm slowly moved off. Con Ed 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 Tuesday night.