Mayor Bill de Blasio blasted Con Edison Monday as roughly 19,000 customers remained without power — including 13,000 in Brooklyn.
A half-day after Gov. Andrew Cuomo ripped the utility giant, saying that it “should have been better prepared,” a hot-under-the-collar de Blasio followed suit, saying at a press briefing at the Office of Emergency Management’s Interagency Command Center in Mill Basin that he “can’t trust them.”
“I’m not getting any real answers and they have let New Yorkers down once again,” Hizzoner said.
“I am extremely disappointed with Con Ed. They have been giving us consistently inconsistent information over the last days,” he added.
“This was a situation we all saw coming and I don’t have any good answers yet of why this happened and why this was not prevented,” de Blasio said, adding, “This was obviously a predictable situation and therefore preventable.”
The power company said it restored juice overnight to more than 30,000 customers after thousands of Big Apple residents lost service Sunday afternoon.
The company expects to have the customers now without service restored by Monday afternoon.
Roughly 13,000 of those customers still without power are in the southeast Brooklyn neighborhoods of Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Old Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and part of East Flatbush.
Several thousand other customers remain without power in the city and Westchester County.
On Sunday, Con Ed cut the power across parts of Brooklyn due to the Big Apple’s recent heat wave so the company could “make repairs and prevent a bigger outage,” de Blasio said in a tweet at the time.
“They made a conscious decision to pull out the electricity from this area,” de Blasio said Monday. “I assume they believed they were on the road to something much worse if they didn’t do it, but again, we don’t have any clear answers.”
The mayor noted that Con Ed cut the power to those Brooklyn neighborhoods “just as it was getting dark,” prompting the city to deploy first responders, including an additional 200 NYPD officers, to the affected areas.
“There were no arrests, no summonses, no reports of any problems at all,” de Blasio said.
The mayor also called for a “full investigation” into the Sunday and July 13 power outages, and suggested that the city “examine whether we need a new entity to handle this situation going forward because at this point, I do not have faith in Con Edison.”
“It’s very clear we have to question whether Con Ed, as it is structured now, can do the job going forward or whether we need to go an entirely different approach,” he said.
De Blasio went on to say that Con Ed “is a private company that is heavily regulated,” but it is “not accountable to the public the way a public agency would be.”
“They’re not doing their job,” said de Blasio. “Bottom line is this should not have happened and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He continued: “It’s very clear we have to question whether Con Ed can do the job moving forward.”
Con Ed spokesman Alfonso Quiroz said in a statement to The Post on Monday: “We are completely focused on getting customers back in service, and we regret the distress they are under.”
Quiroz said the utility company deliberately cut the power on Sunday to thousands of customers in Brooklyn in order “to prevent longer outages that would have caused even more hardship.”
“If we had not acted as we did, more equipment would have been damaged, further delaying and complicating restoration.”
Quiroz explained to The Post that the power grid in the affected Brooklyn areas consists of above-ground and underground infrastructure.
On Sunday, “there was a problem in the overhead section,” which left 3,000 customers without power, Quiroz said, adding that the utility company then “preemptively” cut the power to 30,000 customers to make repairs.
The spokesman noted that the power would have ultimately gone out for those customers even if the company did not intentionally cut it.
Brooklyn residents still without power Monday slammed both Con Ed and de Blasio.
“It’s unbelievable what they’re doing to us. No power, no phones,” said Shuli Reisch of Mill Basin. “They didn’t even give us a warning. We shouldn’t have to live like this.”
Meanwhile, temperatures in the Big Apple dipped by Monday, according to AccuWeather, which forecast a high of 82 degrees and a low 68 degrees.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for New York City at noon Monday until 8 a.m. Tuesday as thunderstorms were expected Monday afternoon and evening.
Additional reporting by Daniel Cassady