By Jared Evan
Mayor de Blasio was campaigning in Iowa for his disastrous run as Democratic presidential nominee as 72,000 of his city’s residents experienced a massive blackout that left the West Side of Manhattan in the dark Saturday.
De Blasio took heat from the governor as City Council Speaker Corey Johnson ended up having to be the “defacto mayor” updating New Yorkers of the situation.
Last Saturday night, a blackout effected hundreds of thousands of con ed customers, along with thousands upon thousands of theater and concert goers, tourists and diners along a 30-block stretch from Times Square to about 72nd Street and Broadway, for several hours.
According to an AP report, those attending the Jennifer Lopez concert said that Madison Square Garden went dark about 9:30 p.m. in the middle of Lopez’s fourth song of the night. The arena was later evacuated. And at Penn Station, officials were using backup generators to keep their lights on.
Meanwhile hundreds of restaurants, stores and bars in the Times Square area were forced to close, and almost every Broadway performance was cancelled, spiraling the 30-block area into a surreal and confusing scene as thousands of theater goers lined up outside theaters.
“Look, mayors are important and situations like this come up, you know, and you have to be on site,” Cuomo told CNN, the entertainment/news network. “I’ve been governor of New York for eight years. In that time, I can count the number of times I left the state on my fingers.”
Clearly this was a swipe at de Blasio who recently missed D- Day celebrations and the Puerto Rican Day parade to campaign for his long shot presidential campaign.
Gov. Cuomo was forced to fly in from Albany to the emergency command center on the Upper West Side, where he held a press conference.
“We have to have a system that is designed to handle disruptions and rather than domino, we have a redundancy in the system, so this doesn’t happen” again, Cuomo told reporters at the press conference.
“We just can’t have a power outage of this magnitude in this city. It is too dangerous. The potential for public safety risk and chaos is too high. We just can’t have a system that doesn’t. It’s that simple at the end of the day and that’s what we’re goanna work on.”
The governor said he has directed the state Department of Public Service to investigate the cause of the blackout in hopes of preventing another of its magnitude, NY Post reported.
Many people went to social media to give credit to Corey Johnson for taking over in the mayor’s absence.
“Mayor Corey Johnson has done a bang-up job during the last five hours. We have no idea what that random guy in Iowa is doing but good luck to him.”, a Hell’s Kitchen resident commented on Twitter, while another local commented “Corey is mayor for the night.”
De Blasio appeared on CNN to defend himself on the entertainment and news channel: “When you’re a mayor or governor, you’re going to travel for variety of reasons. The important thing is to have the hand on the wheel, make sure things are moving effectively, and communicate to people.”
