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Midtown Manhattan was surreal on Saturday night.
The center of our little island is supposed to be the center of the universe. Still, I write this after eating a lukewarm dip for dinner in the light of a candle (hot) at a temperature of 90 degrees with the windows closed, to thwart the time to finish it. before my computer is out of its last moments of electricity.
Yes, we want to be the center of finance, technology and the media, but we can not even keep the lights on on a Saturday night. Meanwhile, our fearless leader, Mayor Bill de Blasio, communicates by radio from Iowa, where they have a lot of power.
Yesterday, around 7 pm, the lights of our apartment just west of Midtown blinked very hard.
We had already seen this before. Last winter, February 16, to be exact, while my husband and I were dining, our lights went out, then lit again.
We looked at each other and then suddenly, boom! A man's hole had exploded right outside our window. The following two manholes exploded one after the other, each boom moving the windows harder and sending our neighbor next door, two small dogs behind, for him. ask what she had to do.
Our answer: nothing. The whole street before us was in flames; even the firefighters were standing behind their trucks, which were well behind the fire, waiting for a good half-hour, during which Con Ed turned off the power before he could pour water into it. We could not evacuate directly into a fire; We stayed up, away from the windows … and the lights were not out.
This incident may have taken half an hour, but has since caused months of chaos. Con Ed has spent the last five months digging our street – 50th Street, a five-minute walk west of the nation's business capital – and filling it up, digging and filling the same day while trying to replace the burned sites. -all infrastructure across two blocks while allowing traffic to move cars and trucks. They work during the day. they surprise us by waking up in the middle of the night with klieg lights.
I do not know at all if a 49th Street substation "incident" on Saturday night – not far from our little one in February – has nothing to do with the fact that Con Ed is desperately digging our street, one block north for six months.
I know our infrastructure is fragile and our emergency response is inadequate. Walking around Midtown on Saturday night was an exercise in selecting the dystopia you wanted to focus on.
Thousands of people escaped from canceled theatrical performances – in the streets and avenues, where they were vulnerable to a wave of cars, buses and trucks going past unusable traffic lights, he said. Was acting from a terrorist attack.
Diesel generators have entered the World Wide Plaza office building in the West Side, spewing toxic vapors for more than an hour into the windows of elderly residents living nearby, a few hundred miles away. meters only.
Their choice was to stay out of the heat or breathe poison – this, twelve years after New York supposedly designed a "sustainable" plan for the environment.
Times Square was both dark and dark, depending on sites invested in generators that, in the long run, make the island even hotter for people without air conditioning.
The MTA did a really heroic job by blocking trains in tunnels until the next station so people could get on the floor, but the power cut in Midtown caused the paralysis of the train. a dozen lines connecting Brooklyn to the Bronx. You were not going anywhere if you could not go through Manhattan.
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