Tonight marked the 1,800th edition of The Call. Safe to say, there haven't been too many kind words for Con Edison or the MTA the past seven years. This time around, it seems Sandy is silencing some critics. (I said some, not all.) New Yorkers may not be pleased, but the magnitude of this storm puts things in perspective.

Two weeks ago tonight, Sandy reached landfall in New York City, leaving more than one million Con Edison customers without power. Officials say Sandy caused five times as many outages as the last largest storm in Con Edison's history. Today, the utility said it is "wrapping up" restoration to everyone "whose equipment could be restored."

Those with extensive damage who are still in the dark include 16,000 customers in flood-ravaged areas of Brooklyn, Queens and on Staten Island. In addition, 11,500 LIPA customers in the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens remain without electricity.

Also today, the MTA reopened the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel for limited rush-hour bus service. Two weeks after Sandy, all vehicular tunnels are now open and only a handful of subway stations remain closed because of extensive flooding.

How would you grade the MTA's response to Sandy? What grade would you give Con Edison and LIPA? Given the unprecedented impact of the storm, are you pleased or disappointed by the how the city functioned the past two weeks? What suggestions do you have to improve their response in the future?

Send your thoughts using the link above.

As a homeowner living on Staten Island in the Midland Beach area and being without lights and heat for 2 weeks has been tough but not as tough as some have it. I would like to know how folks are suppose to pay out of pocket for a private electrician in order to be approved for con edison to turn on your lights back on. I live check to check -- where is $1100 coming from not to mention all the other expenses, food, cleanup, dangling garage door. Insurance you say....I have both home and flood please tell my rep to call me. FEMA you say.....they came surveyed and I will hear from someone within the next 10 days -- guess I will have to get use to the dark.

Valerie
Midland Beach Staten Island.

John,

I give CON ED and the MTA good grades. I give a very bad grade to LIPA. They are no better, perhaps worse than LILCO, the worst utility ever. For years, LILCO and now LIPA have had the chance to bury cables yet they continue to put them on poles subjecting them to risk in storms. CON ED is guilty of the same thing in certain areas such as Staten Island.

Joe
Port Richmond, SI

Hi John,

The truth is that we live without repairs on/in/for anything and when tragedy strikes they panic because they have done nothing for so long and also they are guilty of squandering our tax dollars. So immediately the first response is to throw the bouquets at one another but they are not interested in us and they also don't care because all they want is their titles and have and demand pulling rank on all of us and so therefor we will always be in a mess. Just where is all of the money we give and they take from us in this state. So the bottom line is that they just want to collect their pay checks and we continue to be a divided city and that means some get free/bees in exchange for their votes and the other half pay the tab.

THEN IN THE END THEY SCREAM THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS TO HELP FOOT THE BILL BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TO DO THE REPAIRS.

Thank you John,
maxxiee
mp

So what is the story on the south ferry whitehall R 1 subway stop? NO timeline!

Tom
Richmondtown

John -

I would give the MTA a B grade. The Staten Island Railway (SIR) management though I would give an F since they tend to forget they are part of the MTA. If it wasn't for NY1 coverage which I was able to watch again after 3 days with no power, I would not have known the status of the Staten Island Railway service. The news radio didn't include any updates for the Staten Island Ferry or the Staten Island Railway for that matter.

The SIR needs to improve the Staten Island residents for updates pertaining to the level of service. For Con-Ed they are trying their best but from your guest on the First Word it appears they need to improve their planning for when these big storms are on the forecast.

John, Oakwood

Con ed and LIPPA knew a storm like Sandy could happen, and knew how to prepare for it. They gambled it wouldn't be that bad because they didn't want to spend the money for the necessary upgrades. corporations are more interested in having bigger profits than serving their customers.

meryl from manhattan

Every worker did a great job including management at LIPA, CONED. MTA. This was a natural disaster. The typical callers you get expect a government employee to hand them food, drive them to work and put a generator on at there house. It's the typical socialist Americans that want and expect everything done for them and handed to them. I understand the need from the devastated areas, the sick in hospitals and elderly. The majority of the ppl on tv and radio don't fit in these demographics!!!!!

T.S.

Hello,

I'm appalled by how many people are finger pointing and acting like animals at gas stations as if the storm was generated by someone clicking a button! No one can control God and His work. People that are still alive and haven't lost loved ones should be thanking God every minute. Having no water, heat or hot water isn't the worse that could have happen considering those who lost their entire homes. And even those who did lose their homes, should still be humble that they can start over. If you lost a home worth a million dollars or more and you don't have family or friends to stay with, then reevaluate who you are and the company you kept. This storm should be a humbling experience but people just don't get it! And finally, Mayor Bloomberg doesn't deserve praise, its his job to provide resources to the city, which he hasn't done in thoroughly. Lower Manhattan flooded severely, including the Coned plant, yet all power was restored!!! Harlem was flooded, along the FDR/Harlem River Drive, hundreds of cars destroyed, yet nothing was reported on the news. Gov. Cuomo has done more than Bloomberg!!! Even in devastation, money talks!!! What a shame.

Arnyce.

There are a lot power issues all over the area, but the Con Ed explosion at 14th St. and the East River never should have happened and was caused by incompetence. Anybody who looked at a map and saw a weather report could see that the surge of the Atlantic Ocean coming up the East River from the harbor and and down the East River from the Long Island Sound at high tide at the full moon could see that that Con Ed station was going to be creamed with water. In fact it was three or four feet all the way up to Ave B. The whole plant should have been shut down way before that happened (the subways were).

Is that plant on 14th St. in operation now? I'm told that the power for the East Village is coming from Brooklyn. Is that true?

Was anyone hurt in the explosion? I heard there were and worse, but there is no reporting on that.

What I do know, is I saw a whole convoy of giant "Environmental Disposal" tanker trucks hauling away who knows what? What's that about and what really happened in that explosion at Con Ed on 14th St. and the East River?

Bobby G
East Village

The MTA, ConEd, Lipa and SDNY workers are absolutely great. Their managements, not so much. And as one caller pointed out: when did you ever see Bloomberg up a utility pole or walking along the tracks of a dark, flooded station?

Frances
East Village

John,

The grade that I give the public utilities is a big F for failure. Also the same to the MTA and the gas companies for the long gas lines. People have gone 2 weeks without heat, hot water, electricity and when you take into account that there are people are sick and elderly, this adds to the problem. This is unacceptable.

The problem is that Con Edison and the other utilities should have been prepared for this extreme case of hurricane Sandy. I think that the issue is that everyone up here in the northeast thought that we could never get a hurricane similar to Katrina, with the result of being totally unprepared and caught off guard.

Governor Cuomo is absolutely right that the public utilities should be held accountable.

anthony
Bayridge Brooklyn

Government and relief agencies knew this storm was coming and heading to our low lying areas. It took too long to get food and basic supplies to the residents of the high rises in Red Hook and Coney Island. The volunteer efforts came first and were amazing!

Elizabeth

Over one week ago i was headed to Coney Island to volunteer. I waited nearly one hour for a bus in Bayridge while 4 passed me that were "out of service". Not too cool. I waited an hour.

Hey Mahdi from Bayridge...it makes me proud to see a former student getting involved in important discussions such as this.

I give the MTA a B- but Mahdi, you get a plus 5 for class participation:-)

A Fort Hamilton High Teacher.

I feel like they are doing a Great job trying to restore everything after Sandy. People need to be patient and be thankful that at least they are trying to take care of everyone's needs as fast as they can. Some people should take a moment to think that it's not easy for us to take care of all our house needs on a weekly basis so therefore it's not that easy to have everything up and running like how it use to be in such a fast time when there's so much that needs attention.. Please be Thankful that New York cares about us and that they are trying there best to reach out to everyone's needs!!

Raquel from Whitestone

I agree with caller Alice , considering the extent of Sandy, the MTA was up and running quicker than what I expected, I'm impressed, but LIPA should be ashamed of themselves and Coned gets a B from me.

Carmen, Bay Ridge

The mta response was wonderful and they worked hard but I think they should of connected queens and Manhattan first because bridge and bus traffic was horrible. It took me four hours to make my way to Manhattan and I had to walk the bridge after riding the bus. And it took me five to get back home.

Tulio @ jackson heights

This was a bad storm. It's not the first and won't be the last. Those above ground electrical wires have to be buried underground. those workers are doing the best they can under rhe circumstances.

Joann

The city, state and the country have handled Sandy’s aftermath as well as can be expected - or perhaps even a little better. We need to keep in mind the severity of the storm hitting one of the world’s largest cities that sits across islands, multiple tidal rivers, marshlands and beaches. It’s an area that almost never gets storms nearly as severe as Sandy. The city handled warnings, information distribution, prep, security, information collection, mapping human and infrastructure needs, removing red tape to provide aid to an area with tens of millions of people hit severely across a wide and complicated space. These past couple weeks have been terribly frustrating for many – even devastating. But the city and State of New York and Federal Government have done as much as any citizen in any great American city can reasonably expect given the scale and time that they’ve had to date. This is New York – it’s still the best city in the world to live and work in. Let’s all try to be thankful for what we still have and see what we can do to help rather than criticizing those that are trying their best to help.

Damon
Battery park City

John,

This time the MTA made the right decision to close down the system otherwise we would not have been able to restore the level of service we have now. I don't think LIPA made any preparation for the storm. They didn't think the magnitude of the storm woudl be this extensive. They got caught with their pants down and will pay for their ineptitude down the road.

Jeanne
Brooklyn, NY

I work in Manhattan and life has resumed as normal there. Here in Howard beach people are in such need for assistance. We are not in an evacuation zone but the storm took everything from our community. We all don't have electricity yet and seems FEMA doesn't wont to do much.. All i hear is people talking about getting any assistance to rebuild! Bloomberg was at our school to see first hand, lets see what happens with that!

It's very frustrating !

AnnMarie from Howard Beach

MTA maintenance of way personnel should get an A+: their Herculean effort to get the subway system up and running this quickly should be applauded, and give lie to the contention that unionized public employees can't work efficiently and effectively in the public interest.

MTA managers, particularly those responsible for creating train schedules, deserve an F: they failed to create contingent train schedules to run subway lines when the lines couldn't get to their regularly scheduled terminals, forcing supervisors to create ad-hoc schedules on the fly, further exacerbating congestion and confusion, and crippling service delivery when service restarted on Nov. 2nd.

PETE FROM MANHATTAN

it is so sad that this country, this state this city all over the world knows NYC, and what happened should be prevented in advance, if I live in the woods I know that I need to take care my self, (gas, water, food, flashlights,) etc but when you live in the city we we put ours lives and rely in the city ( government, utilities etc) so if they do not do what they have to do in this situation, what we need to do?

the MTA always been having problems with the system, mostly in winter because the snow or water, so instead of not spending money in the necessary stations to fix the problems so do not happen again, what they do make some new or renew some stations were is lots of tourist interest, but not to fix the problems that the system has.

the utilities it is so sad to say but they do not want to fix anything up until they have the problem, knowing before hand that can happen, but they wait, to see how long they can work, then something like Sandy comes and Oh! we have to update this and that. this is not a third world country or city.

Alvarez

MTA’s disaster plan was a disaster. First, they shut down the trains way too early. They could have waited till midnight that Sunday a least to allow more people to get home.
Then, to have everyone encourage to get back to work on Wed after the hurricane with only a limited bus line was a joke and insult to New Yorkers. I would have required majority of the bus drivers to come to work in the same way they require nurses to stay at work or Ill have them picked up via van/ bus so that they can work on that day and have more buses running Also, how come it took MTA too long to inspect and let the 7 train line which is elevated and let it run through at least Queensboro which they have been doing almost every weekend for a good part of the year. When they let the trains run through Barclay Center, they should have anticipated the crowd and should have had rails ready and policemen on day one to control the crowd and make the “lining up” for the limited bus again. MTA gets a D for their disaster plan. Understandably Sandy was hurricane that caused a lot of damage, but MTA never had a plan

Eric
Elmhurst, Queens

Residents on Staten Island still without power are being told different stories by Con Ed. My wife was told our application for power in Oakwood hadn't been reviewed. Another family member, in the same house, was told the utility needed to order parts for a transformer. This is getting zero coverage as the media remains obsessed with LIPA, so Con Ed is leaving its customers in the dark and getting away with it.

Andrew