Con Edison and the subways: greed kills

Con Edison is leading a determined campaign that critics say will bilk and endanger its customers, and overload and underpay its workers.

After stray voltage from Con Edison killed a woman who fell on a metal utility-hole cover while walking her dog in 2004, the company agreed to spend $10 million to detect stray voltage on the streets of New York City to settle the lawsuit her family brought.

However, the first four months of this year, according to a Con Edison spokesperson, nearly 2,000 hot spots were identified, twice the rate of last year. The workforce at Con Edison is so depleted that there is no way workers can get repair crews to many of these spots in a timely fashion.

So the company began hiring livery drivers to park near the hot spots and to put up cones and warning signs. When the Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2 noticed what was going on, it complained to the Public Service Commission (PSC).

“You wouldn’t want a limousine driver to respond to a fire until the Fire Department could get there any more than you would want a limo driver to respond to a Con Edison emergency,” said John Duffy, vice president of Local 1-2.

The PSC ignored the union’s complaints.

While Con Edison ducked the question, some reporters checked the limousine companies and estimated that about 1,000 drivers got an 8-hour shift doing Con Edison’s “public warning” duty at $150 a shift.

The PSC has been currently forced to conduct hearings on why Con Edison took 10 days to restore service last summer to 150,000 customers in northwest Queens during a heat wave. The union’s position on the cause of the power outage is that Con Edison basically is not maintaining its distribution network to the level it should.

The thousands of extremely dangerous hot spots throughout New York City are another sign of this lack of maintenance.

But Con Ed bosses obviously feel no shame. Con Ed just filed a petition with the PSC on May 4 for a rate increase that would bring in an additional $1.2 billion a year. Residential rates would go up by 17 percent a year and commercial rates by 10.6 percent.

Con Edison is not the only large institution in New York that ignores safety and maintenance. The past two weeks saw two subway track workers killed.

At one incident, when track workers tried to turn off power to the third rail, they found the emergency switch didn’t work. They ran to the other end of the platform and pulled that emergency switch. It didn’t work. They had to go outside and across the street to a fare booth that was still staffed to ask central control to turn off the power.

The subsequent investigation revealed that 70 emergency switches in the system don’t work and weren’t marked.

Now they are marked and the Transit Authority, which runs the New York City subways, has promised to fix them as “soon as possible.”

The TA is hinting that the workers involved in these tragedies were taking shortcuts. One of the survivors, speaking at the funeral of his co-worker, made it clear that they were doing exactly what they were told to do.