Local officials pushed to bring emergency assistance to the streets of Park Slope on Monday as a dayslong power outage continued.
Residents started to lose power on Friday, Jan. 30. As of Feb. 2, nearly 2,000 households in the neighborhood were still without electricity, according to Con Edison’s outage map, with issues clustered on the north end of Fourth Avenue between Douglass and Pacific streets.
A ConEd spokesperson said conditions caused by last weekend’s snowstorm sparked the electrical issues. Melting snow mixed with road seeped underground and damaged wires and equipment, they said, causing “localized failures.”
After a week of below-freezing temperatures, manholes are still blocked by snow, ice and snowed-in vehicles, they added, slowing response times as crews “dig out dense, frozen layers of snow and ice just to access the system.”
Those lengthy repair timelines have left residents increasingly frustrated. Some locals were initially told they would have power back by Saturday morning, only to receive multiple text updates pushing their restoration estimates back by hours at a time.
Park Slope resident Michael Liss said the issues started on Friday evening, when a brownout hit his apartment building. Some lights in his unit were functioning normally, he said, while others wouldn’t come on at all, or would just barely glow. The pilot light on his HVAC system wouldn’t engage, and the heat stopped working.
The situation was similar in neighboring units and buildings, he said, though most people still had functioning heat. Conditions worsened after a manhole fire at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Bergen Street on Saturday morning, he said, and many more people lost power and heat completely.
The outage left thousands of people facing dangerously-cold weather without electricity or heat. Though temperatures climbed above freezing for the first time in nine days on Monday and were expected to hit 36 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, per the National Weather Service, lows will remain at or below 22 degrees, with even colder wind chill.
Liss and his family have been staying in a nearby hotel since Friday, he said. They were initially told that power would be restored on Saturday morning, but their home was still dark as of Monday evening.
More and more neighbors have checked into the hotel as the outage has gone on, Liss said.
“We’re fortunate to be able to ride this out at a hotel for a little while compared to people who have to go to shelters and heating centers,” Liss said. “It’s an inconvenience, it’s disruptive, but we’re grateful that we can work our way through it compared to the way it could be impacting other people.”
Council Member Shahana Hanif was briefed by ConEd on Monday, she said on social media, and was told that two high-voltage feeders were down, and that crews were moving “block by block” to identify and isolate the broken equipment so they could safely restore power. ConEd sent a customer service van to the corner of Baltic Street and Third Avenue on Monday to provide in-person assistance.
In the meantime, Hanif worked to bring emergency resources to the nabe. Cops were deployed to direct traffic at crowded intersections where traffic lights were down, she said. The Office of Emergency Management dispatched a “warming bus” to Baltic Avenue between Fourth and Fifth avenues, a spokesperson told Brooklyn Paper, and opened the Wyckoff Gardens Community Center at 280 Wyckoff St. as an additional warming center.
The community center will be open 24/7 until all power is restored, the spokesperson said, and both warming stations are free to use. The neighborhood’s other warming center, at a local school, was unavailable after students returned to classrooms on Monday morning.
Con Edison has said that residents will not be charged for days they were out of service and thus not using electricity, and urged locals impacted by outages to submit reimbursement claim forms online or in-person within 30 days of the outage.
The utility usually reimburses customers for the cost of refrigerated food or medications lost during power outages. Hanif said Monday that she wants more.
“I demanded that Con Edison reimburse residents for costs caused by this outage—such as travel and temporary accommodations—on top of their usual reimbursement for spoiled food and medication,” she wrote on X. “Con Edison refused. We will continue to escalate, but please factor this into your decision-making.”
In a Feb. 1 letter to ConEd CEO Timothy Cawley, Hanif said the impacts of the outage were “serious and unacceptable” and urged the company to suspend billing and issue automatic bill credits to all impacted customers.
“This outage comes amid significant and widely reported increases in utility bills,” Hanif wrote. “Constituents are being asked to pay more while experiencing extended service failures — an untenable situation that demands immediate corrective action.”
Editor’s note: Park Slope resident Michael Liss works as a contractor with Brooklyn Paper’s parent company Schneps Media.
