By Mary Johnson and Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Staff
MANHATTAN — Hundreds of Manhattan residents are still taking cold showers thanks to Hurricane Irene.
Fifty buildings in Manhattan, including parts of Stuyvesant Town, have had no hot water since Saturday afternoon, when Con Edison cut off steam lines to prevent them from being damaged by flooding.
Con Ed crews are now working round-the-clock to inspect the pipes and turn the steam back on, but the service may not be restored until Tuesday evening, said John Miksad, Con Ed's senior vice president of electric operations.
"We have started the restoration of those 50 customers," Miksad told reporters in a conference call Sunday afternoon. "We'll work on that today through Tuesday until they're all restored."
The steam lines do not appear to be damaged by the storm, partly because Con Edison preemptively shut them down, Miksad said.
The 50 buildings without hot water are mostly located below 14th Street but others, including part of Stuyvesant Town, are above 14th Street on the East Side, Miksad said.
Darin DePaul, 50, and Debra Cardona, 53, said their Stuyvesant Town apartment lost hot water at 2 p.m. Saturday, well before the storm hit Manhattan.
"I thought they should at least have waited till 2 a.m.," Cardona said. "It's a little annoying, but it's definitely livable."
The couple said they were glad that at least they didn't lose electricity.
"It could have been so much worse," DePaul said.
Virginia Andersen, 35, a Stuyvesant Town resident and psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, also said the lack of hot water wasn't a major problem.
As of 2 p.m. Sunday, all Manhattan buildings had electricity, but 121,000 Con Edison customers in the other four boroughs and Westchester County did not, Miksad said.
Supplemental crews including hundreds of utility workers from Colorado, Texas, Mississippi and elsewhere traveled to New York to help restore service.
"We're doing our best to get our customers back [in service] as quickly as possible," Miksad said.
