Con Ed | The Lo-Down : News from the Lower East Side

Con Ed Letter: “There is Limited Steam Generation Capacity at This Time”

A local resident noticed this letter from Con Ed hanging at Village East Towers on East 10th Street. It reads:

Dear steam customer,

We understand that this has been a challenging time for all of our customers, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience these outages have caused. Please be assured that our employees have been working around the clock to restore steam service. Unfortunately due to storm damage there is limited steam generation capacity at this time. With a cold front expected on Monday and Tuesday… we do not have enough capacity to meet our forecasted demand. Therefore, we are not able to restore any additional customers until more of our steam production units are brought online. We are working to bring additional steam supply into service so we can restore all of our customers. Once the system is capable of handling additional load we will begin restoring customers. We will work to return all customers to service as quickly and safely as possible, and a full system restoration is expected by November 11, 2012. Thank you for your patience and support.

Charles Veimeister, Steam Business Development

Good Morning!

A Con Ed crew works last night on Grand Street. Photo by Roey Ahram.

This morning thousands of downtown residents are still without heat and hot water as the temperatures hover in the 30’s and a nor’easter threatens to hit the region by mid-week. It’s 39 and cloudy now; we’re expecting sunny skies by afternoon and a high of 48. Coming up: a complete update on hurricane recovery efforts, including the latest on Con Ed’s timetable for restoring steam on the Lower East Side.

Follow-up: East Broadway Manhole Explosion

Here’s an update on last night’s manhole explosions on East Broadway (near Samuel Dickstein Plaza). We just got off the phone with Con Edison spokeswoman D. Joy Faber, who said workers are making repairs on corroded electrical cables today and continuing to investigate exactly what caused the blasts. She said it was not a transformer explosion (that’s what firefighters suspected last night).