training. no anything, con-ed was in terrible shape the city totally different place now than it was then. the attitude of all the first responders, equipment they get the training they get i am told by governor s office hate to interrupt we are being told by governor s office about national guard is being brought in to direct traffic freeing up new york s police department we are told police department had what they called a level three callout to bring in extra officers into the city said they had an officer on every street corner to help dreng traffic here then we saw those convoys of fire trucks moving in, to the city, to try and get people out of elevators out of subways check on folks who needed life support. will what happens now in these hours where the lights are coming back on it had may not quite be over, but it is not necessarily in the most serious of emergency moments
westside, completely in the dark. and large buildings issuing evacuations. we sent one out of our own in mid-town to our building on 6th avenue and 48th street alerting our employees on the upper floors that people were on their way to help them out. luckily we do run on generators, so that energy goes to the crucial areas and oftentimes it s not the elevators. we are working to figure out from con-ed what the cause of this was. the latest update is it s a transformer fire on west end avenue and 57th street. they did not update what they thought might have caused that fire, just as you mentioned, 40 plus years to the day of that new york city blackout that lasted for the better part of a
as we reach the top of the hour, the mayor of new york, bill de blas blasio, is tweeting about all of this and mentioning the fire department and the city agencies are responding and trying to get this power outage fixed here in new york city. it was all due to a manhole fire that took place earlier this evening. the disruption is significant. and we do say good afternoon and good evening, everybody, if you re tuning in at 9:00 p.m. eastern. 6:00 p.m. on the west coast. a massive power outage that has taken place about 6:45 p.m. thousands of people are without power. we ve been watching new york s times square where you can see to the left of the scene. many buildings are without power. they have not been restored of yet. con ed is telling us that full power will be restored by 10:30
11:00, 12:00, 1:00 a.m. when you would like to be home. you have kid at home with babysitters. you have older folks who are hot and miserable on the streets, things could change pretty quickly. we are looking at a live picture where there is police tape up and we see a lot of new york police officers heading in. this is the transit center in new york city. this is where the transformer was? this is where the transformer blew that is cordoned off, and it s dark everywhere around there. and it looks like it s dark for blocks and blocks. this is on the westside of manhattan. do you have any sense when you talk to con ed and work on the contingency plans, is this a situation where you could have a
lessons we can learn about how to do that even better in the future. i want to thank some of the officials who are here today who played a very important role yesterday, first deputy mayor dean foolihan, deputy of operations lauren england. you ll hear from the president of con ed, but thanks to mila blair. i want to thank the elected officials who were there working to help their communities, both as speaker of the city council and as a council member representing the affected area, speaker cory johnson, and of course, state senator robert jackson. all of them were tremendously helpful in this effort. now, the investigation s going to look at the root cause, but i want to say up front, the one thing that we are as certain as we can be at this moment about is this was not a cyber attack and this was not an act of physical terrorism. when i got the news, the first calls i placed were to