Con Ed blames equipment failure for blackout

NEW YORK (AP) - A light bulb has gone off for Con Ed. Officials now say they have an idea of what caused Saturday night’s power failure.

The five-hour incident on the West Side of Manhattan was the result of equipment failure near West 65th Street and West End Avenue. The blackout started when a 13,000-volt cable caught fire.

Con Ed says at least two parts of the utility’s system failed causing the outages to cascade from the Upper West Side to as far south as 30th Street.

The power company is still trying to figure out why those failures happened.

Mayor de Blasio says he’s frustrated with Con Ed, but appears most New Yorkers are frustrated with the Mayor.

De Blasio was in Iowa campaigning for his 2020 presidential bid and didn’t make it back for the power outage.

“The question really is being able to stay in constant touch with your team, having the right team in place, make sure that team knows what they’re doing, makes the right calls and if something is happening that you have to come back, you come back quickly,” de Blasio told NY1.

The mayor has raised $1.1 million dollars for his presidential campaign.

The money has come from just 6,700 donors. A figure which is equivalent to .08% of New York City’s 8.6 million residents.