Kevin Burke

"I talked to Kevin Burke again this morning as of this morning they believe there are about 500 customers which still don't have power they would hope that by the end of the day to get virtually all those up." "They have invested three million dollars in the infrastructure. The rest of the city did stay up and kept running fine. They still do not know why this one network failed."

From today's press conference on blackouts and Con Ed:

"I think Kevin Burke deserves a thanks from this city. He's worked as hard as he can every single day since then, as has everybody at Con Ed. And it's easy to go criticize but once this happened, Con Ed has been doing everything they can to bring it back. And I don't think that I could have gone in and done any better."

Maybe we don't know enough about the substance of what went wrong to know the extent to which Con Ed ought ot be faulted for the blackout and the pace of recovery over the last few days.

But it seems well-established, at the least, that Con Ed's initial, ludicrously low estimates of the number of affected customers resulted in a slow and inadequate response to what has turned out to be a really serious problem.

So what are we missing here?