Even as angry West Siders recovered late Saturday from the third recent major power outage there, Commonwealth Edison Co. and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley continued to play a high-stakes bluffing game that could be called as early as Thursday at City Hall.
The outage affected an estimated 15,000 customers, briefly trapping people in hospital elevators, knocking out traffic lights and shutting down power to thousands of homes and businesses, many already hit by blackouts on July 28 and Aug. 5.
”One or two times, that`s OK. But the third time-to me, it looks like something is happening,” said Angel Diaz, who runs a Shell gasoline station on the corner of 26th Street at Kedzie Avenue. ”The city should run the electric company.”
The blackout began at about 7:15 a.m. and lasted seven hours before power was fully restored at 2:15 p.m. No blackout-related arrests or looting were reported.
Commonwealth Edison officials blamed the outage on a worker error during a routine maintenance operation at the Crawford substation, the same facility where a July 28 fire knocked out electricity for up to three days to as many as 40,000 residents.
”This is a completely different situation from before,” said Edison spokesman John Costello. ”Before, it was a fire. This one was our mistake.” Daley and his wife were out of town on vacation Saturday. When he received word of the blackout, said Carolyn Grisko, the mayor`s deputy press secretary, ”the mayor was extremely angry and his response was not printable.”
While it was not as severe as the highly publicized July 28 blackout, Saturday`s outage was one of a nagging series of electrical failures that have hit predominantly black neighborhoods as well as the Gold Coast and even Daley`s own Southwest Side home.
The blackouts have given a high political profile to negotiations between the city and Edison over the future of the company`s 1948 franchise agreement, set to expire Dec. 31.
The agreement represents at least $70 million a year in revenue for the city and ends in the middle of Daley`s 1991 re-election campaign.
Earlier this month, however, as negotiations bogged down, Daley offered to extend the agreement for one year. This would give the city and other agencies more time to conduct a reliability study on electrical power delivery. It would also remove the franchise talks as a potentially troublesome campaign issue for the mayor.
Daley`s plan is scheduled to be considered Thursday before the council`s Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities. But even as technicians restored power on Saturday, Edison spokesman Costello said the company was not willing to commit to Daley`s offer, causing concern among administration officials.
”I just can`t believe Com Ed would ignore the offer,” said Ald. Edwin Eisendrath (43rd), chairman of the committee. ”How would they expect the council to approve something that they themselves would not commit to?”
Saturday`s outage occurred as maintenance workers were cleaning and checking circuits and mechanical components along some of the 27 high-voltage power lines that feed electricity to the West Side, Edison officials said.
One of the workers forgot to remove a grounding device before restoring the equipment to service, causing the circuit breaker to short-circuit and suffer severe damage, the officials said.
A protective relaying system then opened the remaining circuit breakers, shutting down all 27 high-voltage lines-and power to thousands of Edison customers in an area bounded by Madison Street, Pershing Road, Keating Avenue and Oakley Boulevard.
The blackout left a doctor, a nurse and a newborn baby stuck in one elevator at St. Anthony Hospital, 2875 W. 19th St., while a nun was stuck in another elevator at the hospital, a nursing supervisor said.
All four people were uninjured and were rescued within an hour after the hospital switched on its emergency generators.
Elsewhere on the West Side, elevator service was lost temporarily at Chicago Housing Authority buildings. Small-business owners bemoaned the loss of business on Saturday, their busiest day. And homeowners and businesses angrily complained about spoiled food, some of which had been bought on Friday.
Diaz, of the Shell station, said he lost frozen food valued at $1,000 in the first blackout. He estimated his business losses for all three blackouts at $7,000.
”People don`t know how angry the community is now,” said Ald. William C. Henry (24th), who led picketers at the Crawford substation. ”It`s happening at the ground level and working up. People are so angry they`re going to start voting that way even though the mayor himself has tried to help them.”
Despite the community anger, Edison is in a strong negotiating position as the re-election campaign informally continues. Edison knows that Daley has tried to keep his administration free of confrontations even as the mayor`s black political opponents search for an issue to unite a fractured voting bloc.
West and South Side aldermen said Saturday the power outages in black neighborhoods likely will spur black voter resentment against Daley and may increase to a level not seen since the freak 1979 snowstorm that helped sweep former Mayor Michael Bilandic from office.
Daley`s strongest council critic, the South Side`s Ald. Robert Shaw
(9th), said: ”This will galvanize black voters all over the city of Chicago. If it happened in Lincoln Park once, you`d see some action, but because they`re poor and black, Daley`s been playing footsie with Com Ed, hoping to extend this thing so he won`t have to deal with the issue in February.”
The primary elections for mayor are to be held in February 1991.
Since Daley`s offer was made more than two weeks ago, Edison has not given the city any indication how it viewed the proposal, even though hearings on Daley`s plan are to begin in a few days. Edison continued its non-committal stance Saturday.
”I don`t believe that we as a company have a formal decision yet on the plan,” said Costello. ”I think we`re still weighing our options.”
As to the company`s stance affecting Daley`s political alternatives, the spokesman said: ”Com Ed can`t speak for Mayor Daley.”
The complicated negotiations over the 1948 agreement involve an interpretation of how much it would cost the city to purchase Edison`s facilities and whether those options extend to power generating stations outside city limits.
Eisendrath, however, kept open the possibility that the company would send representatives to the Thursday hearing and that Edison would agree to the extension.
”It`s perfectly reasonable for the city to study the reliability question in the face of all these power outages and whether or not Com Ed has adequately maintained facilities that have caused so many problems,”
Eisendrath said. ”I can`t believe they will say no.”
Grisko also was optimistic that Chicago and Edison would come to terms, although she said that the city had not received a response from Edison on Daley`s offer.
”The mayor expects Com Ed ultimately to agree to the extension of the franchise in light of the serious questions that have arisen over the blackouts and Com Ed`s reliablity. The city is optomistic Com Ed will agree.” Grisko also downplayed comparisons between power outages on the West Side and the 1979 snowstorm that helped lead black voters to former Mayor Jane Byrne.
”There`s always a possibility people will try to make this a political issue,” she said. ”But the major difference is that the city is not responsible for Com Ed. And we are angry about it. But the city is responsible for clearing snow off the streets.”
