The New York Times New York Region
Skip to article
New York/Region Home The City Columns New York/Region Opinions

Con Ed Finds 1,214 Stray Voltage Sites in One Year

Published: March 4, 2006

Consolidated Edison, responding to testing requirements imposed after a woman was electrocuted while walking her dog in the East Village in 2004, found 1,214 instances of stray voltage during a yearlong examination of electrical equipment on city streets, officials disclosed at a City Council hearing yesterday.

The stray voltage was detected from December 2004 through November 2005 on 1,083 streetlights, 99 utility poles and 32 power-distribution structures like manholes, service boxes and transformer vaults, according to test results submitted to the state's Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.

In total, 728,789 pieces of equipment were tested.

The tests were required under state rules adopted in January 2005, a year after the woman, Jodie S. Lane, 30, a Columbia University graduate student, was killed when she stepped on a metal plate.

John F. Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, said the company expected to spend $100 million this year toward reducing the risk of stray voltage. "While there is always some risk involved in delivering energy, we work diligently to do it as safely as humanly possible," he said at the hearing.

Despite those efforts, a series of recent mishaps have highlighted the risks of stray voltage in the city.

On Feb. 12, four people were shocked, and two of them were hospitalized, after a frayed cable energized the cover of a service box near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Five days later, a dog was electrocuted on a patch of concrete in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Con Ed had continued to supply electricity to a nonexistent streetlight. "My family dog is dead, and it could have been me or my 1-year-old son if we'd slipped and touched that same spot," the dog's owner, Danny Kapilian, 49, said during the hearing.

On Thursday afternoon, a 9-year-old boy was briefly hospitalized after he reported an electric jolt while walking over a metal plate at West 127th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem.

Stray voltage was detected in an underground device four feet below the spot where the boy reported the shock, but not on the metal plate itself, Mr. Miksad said. He said that utility workers arrived at the scene within 20 minutes but noted that stray voltage is often intermittent.

"As far as we know the surface where that boy walked was safe when we got there," Mr. Miksad testified. "I can't say two minutes before, or an hour, if there was stray voltage."

Several lawmakers said that Con Ed's efforts to detect stray voltage, while laudable, were inadequate. "It's 2006, and New Yorkers should not be afraid to walk on sidewalks and streets for fear of being shocked by an electric current," said Councilman John C. Liu, a Queens Democrat who is chairman of the Transportation Committee, which held the hearing.

Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., who championed a 2004 law that required the city's Department of Transportation to check at least 250 randomly selected sites for stray voltage every year, said the Public Service Commission should conduct independent tests beyond those of Con Ed and the city agency.

"As representatives of people who have to walk through minefields of stray voltage and exploding manhole covers, we believe you have completely abdicated your responsibility," Mr. Vallone told Paul B. Powers, the executive deputy to the commission's chairman. Mr. Powers replied that the commission, a regulatory and rate-setting body, did not have the resources to conduct extensive stray-voltage tests.

Later, Mr. Vallone, a Queens Democrat, accused Con Ed of being slow to act. "Your slogan needs to change from 'On It' to 'Don't Step on It,' " he quipped.

In addition to the almost 730,000 tests conducted last year, Con Ed also conducted more than 150,000 tests for stray voltage during its routine utility work, Mr. Miksad said.

By April, the utility will acquire five vehicle-mounted stray-voltage detection machines linked to video cameras. The machines will reduce, from three months to about a week, the time it takes Con Ed to survey Manhattan for stray voltage after a snowstorm, "when the issue of stray voltage is most acute," Mr. Miksad said.

In its efforts to track and eliminate stray voltage, Con Ed has assigned identification numbers, bar codes and satellite coordinates to all 172,000 poles holding streetlights and traffic signals. And the company has switched to using dual-jacket rubber cables, which are more durable and more resistant to nicks and scratches than older single-layer cables.

At the hearing, state and city officials also described an array of efforts to reduce stray voltage. Con Ed and the city are installing 5,000 isolation transformers, devices that prevent current from flowing through a streetlight if the wiring to the light fails.

The city began to coat 160,000 streetlights with a nonconductive, insulating paint in November and is scheduled to complete the work by May 2007. The city will also replace 149,000 "cobra head" light fixtures by 2008; the new fixtures will be more energy-efficient and contain light-emitting diodes, which will alert workers to the potential presence of stray voltage.

Advertisement