The Body Electric

The alarming truth is that it’s impossible for anyone, even Con Ed itself, to be certain of what hazards lurk beneath the city’s streets. “It’s a really big problem to even know what’s down there [underground],” says Bud Griffis, chair of the Civil Engineering Department at Polytechnic University. “It makes it difficult for construction and for maintenance. The problem with New York City is the underground is so dense. It makes technologies unusable. Something needs to be done.”

It’s the job of the Public Service Commission to regulate New York State utility corporations. At a 2008 hearing before the City Council, Commissioner Curry of the PSC expressed distrust in the management structure of Con Ed and the reliability of its safety protocols.

Meant to be the muscle enforcing Con Ed’s budgets and procedures, the PSC declares in its mission statement that the agency is “charged by law with responsibility for setting rates and ensuring that adequate service is provided by New York’s utilities.” The commission, appointed by New York’s governor, regulates the state’s electric, gas, steam, telecommunications, and water utility companies, aiming “to ensure that all New Yorkers have access to reliable and low-cost utility services.”

One of the responsibilities of the PSC includes peering over the broad shoulders of Con Ed to examine the management and spending practices of the public energy corporation. Members of the PSC pass and veto proposals by Con Ed, acting as a check-and-balance system. But the PSC has recently faced a storm of criticism after passing the highest electricity rate hike in New York’s history—an additional $450 million paid by New Yorkers to Con Ed in the last nine months of 2008 alone. Before it was passed, hordes of local residents and company representatives attended local hearings, testifying that the rate hike was unwarranted. Gianaris was there, waving petitions against the proposal with more than 1,600 signatures of Queens residents.

“They are cutting corners with their maintenance,” Gianaris said in an earlier interview, “and the system is breaking down. Meanwhile, they’re asking for the highest rates in the nation. They must be the only company that screws up their job and wants a reward for it.”
When asked what he thought of Gianaris’ campaign against the utility, Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert says: “Politicians who know nothing about the system think they can run the system. Everybody in this city has an opinion.”

Maintenance is the bottom line. With the double hardship of an underground and aging matrix, methodical and efficiently planned maintenance practices, experts say, are the only means of keeping the system up and running. And evidence is emerging that Con Ed’s have fallen below industry standards.

In its 2006 annual report to the governor, the Connecticut Department of Utility Control took the Queens blackout as a learning opportunity for utility companies across Connecticut, and recommended “vigorous” commitment of funds and planning to replace degraded equipment and to maintain the reliability of underground systems. Connecticut singled out maintenance procedures as a cause for concern: “It is likely that material condition and maintenance issues, separate and distinct from aging, were more important contributors to the catastrophic outages in New York,” the report stated.

New York investigations have concurred that maintenance of the electricity network has been lax. In his investigation of the Queen’s blackout, Gianaris discovered that only about 80 percent of the voltage sensors were functioning at the time of the blackout, and therefore not effectively transmitting information to Con Ed crews. He found that the central technology that reports real-time system damage, a software program called Auto WOLF, was out of order for a full month before the blackout.

Since 1999, Con Ed has reduced its preventative maintenance budgets each year, and some years even underspent those budgets. “Yes, [the maintenance budgets] have gone down from year to year,” confirmed Con Ed spokesman Olert. “The maintenance budget is not as vigorous.”

The company instead chooses to funnel funding into construction projects, like the building of sub-service stations, believed to take pressure off existing systems that will ultimately help dampen the burden of increasing energy use.

The start of the steady decline in preventative maintenance funding occurred just after New York had experienced another of the more dramatic blackouts in recent years, 1999’s 19-hour summer power outage in Washington Heights and Westchester County. Later, the PSC admitted that public safety may have been compromised. The regulator reported, “[Our] investigation into this matter suggests that utilities may not have been placing enough emphasis on safety matters.”

Many experts believe that if Con Ed can’t fix maintenance issues now, they’re only bound to get worse in the years to come. The Bloomberg administration predicts sharp growth to New York City’s population, forecasting an influx of around one million people by 2030. With population already at a record high of 8.3 million residents, the added pressure could make the system buckle. Add to that an increasing demand for electricity, fostered by the escalating use of cell phones and mp3 chargers, computers, video games, multiple television sets, and countless appliances, and many see a recipe for disaster.

“There’s been 20 percent more electricity used in the last 10 years,” noted another Con Ed spokesman, Bob McGee. “We have to be ready for the new residents that are moving into New York.”

The utility’s planning for the increased demand revolves around building new generators and sub-service stations that it hopes will reduce stress on the system. The emphasis is on new construction, rather than on maintaining existing structures.

This means that the future of the city is in the hands of men and women like 25-year-old Luke Russano. He is the face Con Ed wants to present to the public, with his strong, chiseled jaw line, striking brown eyes, and cheeks coarse with the rough beginnings of a beard. Russano is one of almost 9,000 field workers dispatched daily to operate in the veins and arteries of the largest underground system in the world.

For Russano, Con Ed is a lifetime career choice. As a laborer of the underground, he is a unionized General Utility Worker who daily grips the conduits of the city’s lifeblood between his fingers, shaping the pulse with his palms. He came to the company seven years ago, fresh from high school and looking to use his hands. They are surprisingly clean for the amount of manual labor required of the position, though his arms are shaped by months of bending rigid electrical cables. “I didn’t like high school much,” he says. “I never made good grades.”

Now, his alarm rings every weekday morning at 4:45 sharp. After gobbling up a healthy helping of scrambled eggs and bacon, and guzzling down his first large coffee of the day, he hits the road no later than 5:15. Above ground, he wrestles with congested streets between his home on Staten Island and the West 28th Street worksite, usually pulling into the parking lot early, at 6:15 a.m.

Russano’s official shift is from 6:30 to 3:30, five days a week. But he typically stays until 7:30, because he is paid hourly and makes what he calls “really good overtime.” He spends those long hours beneath the concrete sidewalks that most New Yorkers navigate superficially, unconscious of the complex maze of lines and pipes snaking below. In the light blue colors of the corporation, Russano piles on pounds of protective gear: steel-toed boots, fire-resistant clothing, a harness, a hardhat, rubber gloves and safety goggles. Then he descends into narrow manholes. With a grin, he says, “It’s the hottest job in New York.”

These cable-laden crawl spaces can vary from a few feet deep to 20, and often they reek of sewage. Russano shakes his head as he describes the heat and stench, explaining that when the smell is too unbearable to work he has to call in a “Vac Truck” to flush out the manhole and vacuum up the waste. Workers perform a series of tests before Russano can go underground. They take readings of potential toxins, combustible gases or harmful fumes that might leak from pipes and tunnels. Sometimes there’s not enough oxygen, so it must be pumped in.

One of Russano’s supervisors, Bill Fairechio, calls this an “extreme” and “difficult” environment. Crews work in three daily shifts, so that the city has 24-hour coverage.

“I like emergencies,” Russano says. “If the power’s out, you would come in and try to figure out how to fix it.”

His most exhilarating job came almost exactly one year before the steam pipe burst in Midtown. Escorted by policemen, Russano arrived with his crew in Long Island City on July 17, 2006. Over the next 10 days, Russano wrangled with the borough’s debilitating blackout while Gianaris fought the political battle in Astoria.

“Safety’s No. 1 at Con Ed,” says Russano, spouting the company line with the hollow ring of rehearsal. He later admits that some of the cables still in use “go back at least 100 years.”