Bloomberg rubbing salt into the wounds

Did you know there’s a section of New York City that’s been without power for a week? The borough of Queens has suffered without any power whatsoever for 7 days now and the power company, Con Edison, appears to be in the dark, themselves, as to the cause. They also keep moving the goalposts as to the scope of the problem (first it was hundreds without power, then at many as 2000, then 10,000, then 25,000, then 35,000) and they are steadfastly refusing to come up with a firm estimate on when people might expect power to come back on.

That’s bad enough. Let’s listen in to this AP story on the matter printed this morning up in the Rutland Herald:

NEW YORK — The damage to a utility’s underground network in the borough of Queens is greater than imagined — a twist in the six-day power outage that could mean electricity won’t be back until early in the week, the mayor said Saturday.

“It’ll be done when it’s done,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters gathered in Queens’ Astoria Park, where the city’s emergency command center for the blackout is set up.

Consolidated Edison CEO Kevin Burke apologized to customers for the inconvenience and attributed the outages to an unprecedented failure of multiple power lines.

“It was really a very extraordinary event, something that I’ve never seen before,” Burke said. “I don’t know right now what has happened.”

You know what, Mr. Mayor? I’m betting my ass that you aren’t sitting in a dark apartment or house with no air conditioning, no refrigeration for your food, possibly no stove to cook with and doing all that for the 7th day running. I’d also bet my ass you’d be screaming for someone to get stood up in front of a firing squad if you were. So to flippantly spout off to people who have a legitimate right to ask when the hell someone from the very-well-paid public utility sector is going to start making some progress in getting the lights back on makes you look like quite the asshole, Mister Mayor.

“It’ll be done when it’s done?” That’s the lame-ass, do-nothing, I-don’t-give-a-crap-about-you excuse that people give who don’t deserve the paycheck they’re getting, not the sign of a experienced and valuable leader that the Mayor, here, purports to be. Is that the answer he’s getting from the people supposedly doing the work? If it is, then New York needs to find someone who can actually lead recovery efforts. Rudy Giuliani had a helluva lot more damage to contend with and people felt better informed than this in some damn short order. Take some notes, Bloomberg.

I’m also not buying Con Ed’s cop-out that they’re into a problem 7 days and they’ve got no idea what happened or how to proceed. This long into things, they should have seen enough to be coming to some kind of conclusion about at least a broad range of possibilities. Michelle Malkin points out that the extent of the damage seems extensive and widespread enough to wonder whether we’re really dealing with an accident in this case. As she puts it, I also hope that DHS is looking into this. In this case, saying less is definitely not better and I hope the people running this show up in New York start coughing up some details to their citizens and customers.