2nd Co-Op City Power Outage Affects Residents In Same Buildings That Lost Electricity Friday
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- A power outage in Co-Op City on Sunday is impacting potentially thousands of residents in the same buildings that lost electricity Friday.
The latest outage was reported at around 3:30 a.m.
Co-Op City Police said work had begun to restore power to section one, Buildings 1-8, at around 8 a.m.
A resident was carried out of a cold and powerless apartment building and loaded into an ambulance, as several towers in the Bronx neighborhood again went dark Sunday morning, CBS2's Dave Carlin reported.
There was no power much of the day in Building 8.
"It's bad and Friday, too. Same thing. I work from home. I can't work. They can't do their schoolwork. It's terrible," tenant Rashida Thomas told Carlin.
During the outage on Friday, 73-year-old Ada Longmore died.
Family members said she was alone climbing flight after flight in Building 7 to get to her 19th floor unit, carrying an oxygen tank, which was found empty.
Longmore's daughter said her mother came here from the island of Jamaica less than 10 years ago and worked in health care.
In Building 7, the power eventually came back on and in the 19th floor stairwell police tape remains. There also remains many question, Carlin reported.
"Our hearts go out to this family and to this woman. She was our neighbor," said Linda Berk, Riverbay Corporation board president.
At a news conference, Carlin asked politicians and leaders of the Riverbay Corporation, which runs the 35 buildings that make up the community, what went wrong.
"There could be several causes and we have to eliminate them one at a time," manager Robert Klehammer said. "Building 8, where there was the initial transformer fire, we've isolated that and we're hooking it up to a generator.
"It's taking six hours to hook the generator up," Klehammer added.
Co-Op City generates its own power supply and distributes it to residents. Two outages for eight buildings over three days has tenants feeling vulnerable.
"When it doesn't work we're on our own and we cannot get help from Con Ed and we're at a loss," one man said.
"Get to the bottom of what happened and that this doesn't happen again," tenant Shernette Brown added.
Longmore is survived by her husband and five adult children -- four daughters and a son.
