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After 2 Days of Extreme Heat, NYC's Electric Grid Buckles

Men play dominoes at the Tompkins Park Senior Center in Brooklyn. It served as one of the city's cooling centers and was open to the public.

Thousands of New York City residents are grappling with power outages as extreme heat continues to bake the metro area.

Con Ed reports that roughly 50,000 customers were without power as of 10 p.m. Sunday due to scattered outages, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. The utility said it was reducing voltage and asked customers to turn off non-essential appliances.

Con Ed said 30,000 customers in Brooklyn had their power temporarily shut off so it could make repairs and prevent a bigger outage. Mayor Bill de Blasio said Con Ed will start bringing power back to those customers 500 at a time starting at about midnight.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he's sending 200 state troopers, 100 generators and 50 light towers to Brooklyn. He urged New Yorkers to check on neighbors.

In the face of this weekend's extreme temperatures, New York City opened hundreds of cooling centers, extended pool hours and sent out dire messages about staying safe in the hot weather. The mayor had issued a state of emergency, calling for limits on energy use so as not to strain the power grid. Teams of city workers looked to get homeless individuals into shelter, as they do in bitter cold weather during the winter months.

The forecast lived up to its scorching promise. Temperatures on both Saturday and Sunday reached 99 degrees at JFK Airport, according to the National Weather Service. Heat index values were higher, near 110 degrees. 

On Sunday Charles Beverly, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, ventured out to the Wayside Tompkins Park Senior Center near his home. He goes there every weekday, he said, but decided to play dominoes in the center's air conditioned basement on Sunday too.

"I've been getting along," he said of the weather. "I just don't like to be outside in this type of heat. And if I was home, I would be there by myself."

The senior center was one of the city's hundreds of cooling centers listed online. 

Essie Duggan, who leads Wayside Outreach Development, the organization that runs programming at the center, said she was making sure anyone who needed lunch or snacks was fed. Pitchers of water and iced tea sat out on tables in a TV room. 

"We try to keep everybody calm, relaxed," Duggan said, "because when it's hot, lots of time tension and anxiety arise."

The Tompkins Park Senior Center would have been open on Sunday, despite its status as a cooling center, which is perhaps why it had visitors. A visit to another cooling center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, in a Department of Health building, did not have any walk-ins by 1:30 p.m. on Sunday. 

Not everyone fared well in the heat. City health officials said they observed a large increase in the number of heat-related visits to hospital emergency departments and in heat-related 911 calls.  

Nearly half of the people in city jails spent the weekend without air conditioning.

Earlier in weekend public defenders and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson wrote to Cynthia Brann, commissioner of the city's Department of Correction, asking for a safety plan for the city's jail population. Corrections officials released a series of tweets, saying that summer clothing was being distributed and senior level staff were monitoring conditions.

On Sunday, City Councilman Brad Lander said he was part of a surprise inspection of the Brooklyn House of Correction and found "cruelly hot conditions."

Mayor de Blasio was also tweeting about the heat on Sunday when New Yorkers began losing power.

 

With the Associated Press