Con Ed overcame many obstacles to restore power to NYC

which has cost it about $2 billion of the company’s value. Now Burke will have to work hard to convince investors that future storms will not have this kind of effect on the city’s power. One way to do that is by burying overhead power lines in Manhattan and protecting power facilities with brick wall instead of just sandbags, but those improvements will cost millions of dollars.

Burke will also have to prove to investors that Con Ed can continue to serve an expanding city which is becoming more and more dependent on electricity and devices in constant need of re-charging. New York governor Andrew Cuomo wants to upgrade Con Ed’s power grid in order to be able to pinpoint failures and respond to them faster.

“They are one of the best utilities in America,” Greg Reed, who heads up the Center for Energy at the University of Pittsburgh, told CNNMoney. “But the fact is like everyone else their stuff is aging.”

Power was lost in Lower Manhattan when this happened at a power station serves the area.

“That’s when I knew we had a problem,” John Miksad one of Burke’s top lieutenants said. “And it was a very, very big one.”

When Burke got to the station on 29 October, the morning after the storm, his first order was to dry and clean the plant’s equipment, but that was just a small problem. The bigger issue was to bring power to the high voltage power lines strung along electricity towers. Since air can conduct electricity, the high voltage wires need to be far apart so they do not cause a spark, but in Manhattan this is impossible.

Instead, the wires are surrounded by thick oil, which allowed two wires to be put into a 10-inch diameter pipe. The pipes then need to be pressurized in order to keep the air out, but when the station went down, so did the pumps that pressurize the pipes. So the second order was to get the pumps back online, but it takes seventy-two hours to pressurize the pipes.

Later that day Burke asked for a timetable on when power would be restored and he was told Saturday evening, but by mid-day Wednesday officials knew the system would not be ready by then, so the team started running calculations to how many of the eight voltage lines did they need to restore power. After a few hours they found they only needed three, so they focused on those, at the risk that if the power shorted out they would not have back-up.

 On Thursday Con Ed ran into another problem; they were running out of gas. Katherine Boden, who runs the natural gas unit for Con Ed, was able to secure a few tankers and have them drive directly to where the workers were staying, in order to fuel up the trucks while workers were resting.

On Friday morning, the three lines were dry, pressurized, and ready to go, but the circuit breakers had to be fixed. Once the breakers were fixed, power was restored to half the networks that lost power by midnight, as Con Ed’s gamble paid off, allowing them to take their time with the rest of the unit.