Monday, February 11, 2019

City Council holds hearing on Con Ed transformer explosion




CBS NY

 The New York City Council held a hearing Monday on what caused December’s “Astoria Borealis.”

A malfunction at a Con Edison substation in Queens sent out a blue light that could be seen for miles, CBS2’s Jenna DeAngelis reported.
When the city skyline lit up that night, it was a moment that was hard to believe and impossible to forget.
And if you just so happened to be on social media at the time, you likely saw the supernova shades spark some interesting theories.

Fortunately, there were no major injuries, but there were temporary power outages, among other community concerns.
“Families’ homes shook. There was air quality concerns. There was safety concerns,” council member Costa Constantinides said. “We’re gonna get some hard answers from Con Ed as to what happened.”


The council’s Environmental Protection Committee, which Constantinides chairs, heard more from the utility at a meeting on Monday.
“We replaced the faulty equipment, installed a redundant system, and are working directly with the manufacturer to minimize the chance of this happening again,” said Milovan Blair, Con Ed’s senior VP for central operations.

 I have two theories on how this occurred. There is the possibility that the plant at the time couldn't take the amount of energy consumption being used by the growing populace in the area, particularly by the tower hyperdevelopment in Long Island City.

Or the Highlander returned to Queens....





7 comments:

TommyR said...

Not highlander - it was the return of Gozer the Gozerian.

JQ LLC said...

Yeah, Gozer was the more popular theory. But Macleod actually went to LIC to become the "one"

Anonymous said...

Caused by heavy current loads from all the towers in LIC.
The huge crap is going up faster then Con Eds infrastructure can keep up.
Much more fun is coming for summer.

Anonymous said...

Thank God our politicians will figure out the cause of this!

Anonymous said...

Too many people in this city putting too much demand on the power system. Thats the real problem. The only true fix is to downzone the city to prevent more people and even more demand on our power supply system.

JQ LLC said...

Thanks anon 1 and 3.

No one else is addressing this.

ron s said...

Should be interesting to see the city council, with their aggregate lack of science and technical knowledge, come up with anything useful. Expect to see a lot of photo-ops in front of Con Edison with portable podiums and crowds of 15.

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