More deadly electrical leaks are being found on New York’s streets – despite Con Ed’s claim that nearly all stray voltage has been uncovered and that looking harder would just be a waste.
The utility found 7,117 electrified objects on city streets between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31. That’s 468 more than in all of last year, says the Jodie S. Lane Safety Foundation, named for a woman electrocuted in 2004 by faulty wiring in a Con Ed street box.
If Con Ed locates energized objects at the same rate the rest of the year, the number will increase by 11 percent over 2007.
“The more you test, the more you find,” said Roger Lane, founder of the foundation named for his daughter. “Hopefully, the end result is [fewer] people are shocked.”
Con Ed uncovered the electrified objects after state regulators ordered a 150 percent boost in its stray-voltage scans. This followed an assertion by John Miksad, Con Ed’s senior VP for electric operations, at a City Council hearing last January that eight sweeps a year by its fleet of detector trucks would find stray-voltage sources “almost as fast as they occur” and that more searches would not be worth the expense.