The Oil Drum: Local

Update 10:01pm: NY1 has some new coverage, including the fact that a building in Kips Bay is without power and the rest of the neighborhood is still on the brink

Manhattan's East Side is the latest part of the city to be hit with outages. Con Ed crews are working to fix manhole fires and feeder cables along the Lower East Side, as many residents are left without power. Con Ed says the feeders serve more than 50,000 customers, and that could mean hundreds of thousands of people are without power. One of the buildings without power is the Kips Bay Towers. Residents NY1 spoke with there say they are doing their best to cope with the loss of both power and water to the building. “It was a brownout [Wednesday] night. The lights were low, the air conditioners were not as functional as they usually are, so I knew something was happening last night,” said Kips Bay resident Karen Braglia. “And then when I woke up this morning the air conditioning wasn't working at all."

The utility reported that it had lost the use of multiple feeder cables in each of two networks on the East Side, 3 of 12 at Kips Bay and 4 of 24 at Madison Square. The networks cover the area between 14th and 40th Streets, Fifth Avenue and the East River. Three manhole fires in the morning, at 30th Street and First Avenue, 29th Street and Lexington Avenue, and 24th Street and Third Avenue apparently started the problem. Power was still on at midday today in the high-rise, heavily commercial neighborhood. The utility said it had 53,000 customers in the area, but a customer could be an entire building.