(Bloomberg) -- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is expanding a probe into recent New York City power failures as Consolidated Edison Inc (NYSE:ED). reported about 53,000 customers suffered outages amid a heat wave and record demand.
ConEd’s website Sunday night showed customers without power at various times included more than 37,000 in Brooklyn and 13,600 in Queens areas. Cuomo’s office said it directed the State Department of Public Service to expand its investigation into ConEd outages, which was opened after a failure last weekend left 72,000 customers in Manhattan’s West Side without power.
"We have been through this situation with ConEd time and again, and they should have been better prepared," Cuomo said in a statement. "This was not a natural disaster; there is no excuse for what has happened in Brooklyn.”
The company didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on the governor’s statement. It said in a release that it preemptively took customers in southeast Brooklyn out of service in order to protect equipment and to help restore power as soon as possible.
The affected Brooklyn neighborhoods in Sunday’s outage include Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Old Mill Basin, Bergen Beach and Georgetown. The company reported on its website 20,922 customers without power across its service area as of 4:39 a.m. local time Monday.
Relief Expected
Sunday’s outage comes as relief is expected from dangerous heat baking a swath of the U.S. Lower temperatures are forecast after heat advisories and excessive heat warnings stretched from Oklahoma to Ohio and along the East Coast from Maine to South Carolina.
ConEd had earlier in the day asked customers in southeast Brooklyn and parts of Queens, as well as some Bronx neighborhoods, to conserve energy while crews work to repair equipment.
Separately on Long Island, Public Service Enterprise Group (NYSE:PEG) Inc. reported Sunday night that power had been restored to most of the more than 27,000 customers affected by equipment failures.