The outage in Midtown was somewhat of a freak thing. And if you look at the math around it, in a city of 8 million ~70k customers without power for ~5 hours. Th

The outage in Midtown was somewhat of a freak thing. And if you look at the math around it, in a city of 8 million ~70k customers without power for ~5 hours. That's incredible. Is ConEd's network the best? No, there are always improvements that can be made. There is a lot of aging infrastructure that has been replaced and upgraded as a result of Sandy. And to be clear, I think the response to Sandy was unacceptable to ConEd management, not just the union(s). The engineering of the Manhattan network (and the Brooklyn network) is pretty amazing. It's the reason that when there are power outages, they are usually shorter and affect fewer customers. I am reminded of the response to Hurricane Ike in Houston. There were people there in relatively lightly hit areas that went without power for 3+ weeks.