’It’s just the infrastructure,’ says billionaire mayor

When a large steam pipe exploded in crowded midtown Manhattan on July 18, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the press there was no reason to believe it was “anything other than a failure of our infrastructure.”

A worker in a downtown office building was more exact. “It’s not terrorism,” she said. “It’s Con Edison.”

The power company has let its system of pipes and wires deteriorate and as a result the city has been hit with a string of disasters. The explosion occurred exactly one year after the city’s last crisis—a 10-day power outage in the borough of Queens that left more than 174,000 people stranded in a sweltering heat wave. While people have been anticipating a similar electrical breakdown this summer, they were stunned by the volcanic-like eruption of the steam system.

The explosion tore a 35-foot crater in the middle of 41st Street and Lexington Avenue. A truck in the intersection was thrown into the air and then crashed into the hole.

The driver of the truck, a 23-year-old African-American man, was blasted with the 400-degree steam, suffering burns over 80 percent of his body. He remains hospitalized in critical condition.

A woman who had been close to the explosion had a heart attack and died. More than 30 other people were injured in a shower of flying rocks, mud and water.

The blast occurred one block from Grand Central Terminal, one of the main hubs of the city. The blocks surrounding the area were closed to traffic and business for several days. Con Ed has dubbed the blocked-off area the “frozen zone.” Two Con Ed workers leaving the site two days after the explosion said it would be a long time before the pipe was fixed. “There are wires everywhere,” one of them said.

By July 21, two blocks of Lexington remained closed. Filled with trucks and workers, several wearing white and gray protective suits, the street looked like a massive construction site. A day earlier a crew had removed the tow truck that had sunk into the crater.

Many businesses in the area have been shut down, losing tens of thousands of dollars. It’s unclear if Con Ed will fully reimburse them. A spokesperson for the Public Service Commission told the New York Times that state regulations on reimbursements for electricity failures do not apply to the steam system.

While Con Edison is primarily known for selling gas and electricity to the people living in the five boroughs of New York, it also operates the largest steam system in the world. The system pumps steam through a 105-mile network of mains and service pipes buried under the streets. The steam, which travels about 75 miles per hour, is sold to more than 1,800 commercial and residential customers who use it for heating, hot water and air conditioning. Hospitals also use the steam to sterilize instruments. The system includes seven steam-generating plants and 3,000 steam “manholes.”

Con Ed had repaired a leak at the site four months earlier. The power company said it did not know what caused the steam main to erupt but speculated that it was set off by cold water from an earlier rainstorm hitting the underground steam pipe. The 83-year-old pipe was installed in 1924. The New York Times reported that residents in the area had seen steam coming from the vicinity; one woman said it was so thick it was at times difficult to see.

This was not the company’s first steam pipe explosion. According to press reports, there have been more than a dozen such explosions in the city in the last 20 years.

In 1989 a similar eruption occurred outside an apartment building in the wealthy neighborhood of Gramercy Park. Three people were killed and dozens injured in that disaster. The Gramercy Park explosion also created a health hazard from the asbestos surrounding the steam pipe. Con Ed did not tell residents that the air was contaminated with asbestos until four days later, after tenants had tests conducted of the air. Con Edison later pled guilty to failing to report the contamination and in 1995 a federal judge ordered the company to pay a $2 million fine and put it on probation for three years.

The current explosion also involved a pipe wrapped in asbestos. Bloomberg announced at a news conference the day after the explosion that the city’s Department of Environmental Protection had taken air samples throughout the city and, while none of them contained asbestos, some samples taken right at the site did. He advised people who had been covered with debris from the blast to bag their clothes and bring them to a Con Ed collection site.

Con Ed has had numerous other breakdowns in its system. There have been a series of power outages in the metropolitan area just in the past month. In 2004, a young woman was electrocuted and killed when she stepped on a metal plate in the East Village and last year a dog was electrocuted on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. Last year Con Ed reported that, in examining electrical equipment on city streets, it had discovered 1,214 stray voltage sites.

Yet as dangerous as these “hot spots” are, Con Ed came under fire earlier this year for jeopardizing public safety by hiring livery drivers, rather than trained utility workers, to sit in their cars and “guard” the hot spots until the company could make repairs.

The utility, which reported a gross profit of $4.8 billion in 2006, has focused on raking in more money rather than preventing such disasters. In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company reported that its steam operating revenues increased $20 million in the first three months of the year compared to last year, while its electric operating revenues were up $10 million. Steam sales account for about 7 percent of its revenues.

It is also planning to hike its electricity prices. In May it filed a request with the New York State Public Service Commission for an electric rate increase of $1.21 billion effective April 1, 2008. That translates into an 11.6 percent average increase in customers’ bills. The company noted in a press release that a typical residential customer could get a 17 percent hike. The company requested additional increases of $335 million, or 3.2 percent, in 2009 and $390 million, or 3.7 percent, in 2010.

While the company is pushing people to pay more for power, it has shrugged off disasters as if they were unavoidable. But members of the New York State Legislature who looked into the Queens outage last summer pointed to the source of the problem as deregulation of the electrical power industry. The New York State Assembly Queens Power Outage Task Force issued a report in January saying that deregulation left profit-making utilities in charge of monitoring themselves.

“The utilities responsible for distribution of electricity through the grid were left to operate as a monopoly,” the report stated. “Basic economics and experience tells us that monopolies operating free from stringent regulations are a recipe for disaster.”

Members of the community have been fighting to make Con Ed accountable. The Western Queens Power for the People Campaign was started last year by people who live and work in the area to fight for justice and full compensation for the millions of dollars in damages and losses from the July 2006 Queens power outage.

Community efforts like this are needed all over New York City to confront Con Ed’s greed and mismanagement. The real solution is for all services, including power, to be the property of the people rather than privately owned.