Scoop

The New York Times
January 31, 2007
Rising Costs Put N.Y. Transit Projects at Risk
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority faces surging costs that could force it to eliminate or postpone badly needed projects less than halfway through a five-year, $21 billion program to expand and improve its transit system. By one estimate, the program is now $1.4 billion over budget.

Among the projects in that program are renovations to subway and commuter train stations, maintenance of antiquated signal systems, and the purchase of hundreds of buses and subway cars, and many of the projects may be affected, officials indicated.

Much of the problem has been caused by a rapid increase in the cost of construction in New York City, as a result of rising prices for materials and the large number of new projects, which gives contractors the leverage to charge more. In many cases, fewer companies are bidding on projects and offers are coming in much higher than expected.

Another problem is the weak dollar, which appears likely to raise the cost of a contract for subway cars with French and Japanese companies.

“There’s no question that there are serious financial issues confronting the M.T.A. with its current five-year capital program,” said Elliot G. Sander, who took over as executive director and chief executive of the authority this month. “We are particularly concerned about the increase that we are seeing in construction costs, and we have undertaken a comprehensive look at the issue.”

Mr. Sander said yesterday that it was “far too early” to predict whether the rising costs would affect fares.

The alarm was raised in December, when the president of New York City Transit, Lawrence G. Reuter, in a memo to senior staff members, warned of more than $1.4 billion in cost increases in the long-term spending plan and said rising costs were “seriously undermining our ability to proceed with major portions of our program.”

It is not the first time in the authority’s history that officials have warned about changing economic conditions leading to unfulfilled promises, but longtime watchers of the authority said the magnitude of the problem highlighted in Mr. Reuter’s memo was unsettling.

“That isn’t chipping away,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a group that advocates for the needs of transit riders. “That’s cleaving. It’s a huge hole.”

The five-year plan, known as the 2005-9 capital program, includes so-called mega projects, like the Second Avenue subway, a Long Island Rail Road link to Grand Central Terminal and an extension of the No. 7 subway line.

Mr. Russianoff said he was concerned that officials might push ahead with such high-profile undertakings while sacrificing some of the smaller projects needed to keep the transit system in good shape, like buying new subway and rail cars and making station repairs.

In his memo, Mr. Reuter said the cost increases put the transit agency’s basic goal of maintaining a state of good repair in the subway and bus system “in jeopardy” and could force it “to delay long overdue investments.”

Mr. Sander, however, said he would protect the system’s basic needs, calling them “the first priority of the M.T.A.”

Mr. Reuter’s memo dealt with the portion of the long-term spending program administered by New York City Transit, which runs the subways and buses. His agency accounts for more than half the authority’s overall capital program, with $11.2 billion in projects that involve things that riders see every day, like subway station renovations, and less visible matters, like track repair.

In his memo, Mr. Reuter warned that the agency’s estimate of cost increases could go much higher. Citing an inflation rate for large construction projects of 1 percent a month, he said that if that trend continued, “we stand to lose a full year or more of the current five-year program.” That could translate to cost increases of more than $2 billion.

Mr. Reuter, who is retiring next month after more than 10 years as head of New York City Transit, refused through a spokesman to be interviewed.

Officials at the authority said part of the problem they have encountered in recent months was that projects are attracting fewer bidders than they expected.

This is believed to be because some contractors already have all the work they can handle. But it may also be because the authority is in the process of seeking bids for the mega-projects, which are worth billions of dollars. Transit and industry officials say contractors may be refraining from bidding on smaller contracts because they hope to win at least part of a larger contract, perhaps as a subcontractor. Either way, when contracts attract fewer bidders, contractors feel less pressure to bid lower.

A prime example is a project for the renovation of a large subway car repair facility in Upper Manhattan, known as the 207th Street overhaul shop. Only one company bid, and its offer of $379 million was close to $100 million more than the cost estimated by transit officials. The bid was rejected and officials are considering whether to proceed.

The problems go well beyond subways and buses, however.

Tom Bach, the chief engineer for the authority’s bridges and tunnels division, said yesterday that it was “frightening” to open the bids in October from three established contractors for extensive work on the Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge in Queens and find all the bids substantially over the estimate of about $55 million. The bids ranged from $74.9 million to $86.5 million.

As a result, the bids were set aside, and officials decided to split the project into two pieces. The authority will seek bids on one portion later this year and defer the rest of the work until after 2009. The Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North have also seen cost increases.

Mr. Bach said that his division had yet to award contracts for what had been estimated as $400 million worth of projects under the capital program, and that he now expected the work to cost $40 million more.

Mr. Sander said the authority would explore a number of ways to hold the spending plan together. That could include splitting more projects into smaller pieces in hopes of drawing more bidders into the process.

“We need to see if we can drive costs down,” Mr. Sander said. “We need to review the existing scope for these projects to make sure they’re not gold-plated, and we have to see if there are additional revenue sources to support any uncontrollable cost increases in these projects.”

With questions emerging over the long-term spending plan, Mr. Sander has assumed control of an authority that now appears to be facing a twofold financial quandary. The agency’s day-to-day operating budget — which is administered separately from the long-term financing — is expected to have a surplus this year, but projections call for large operating deficits beginning next year.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

The New York Times
January 31, 2007
Mystery Freight Train Out of Queens? It May Soon Be a Familiar Sight
By COREY KILGANNON

EASTPORT, N.Y. — Gritty freight trains may be a familiar sight out West and in cowboy movies, but in Queens and Brooklyn and the neat suburbs of Long Island, they are a roaring, sooty cause for a big double take.

“We go through here every day, and everyone still looks at us like ‘What the heck is this?’ ” said Tom Materka, a rail freight engineer, as the train approached the Hicksville station, one of the Long Island Rail Road’s busiest commuter stops, one recent afternoon. “People are always shocked to see a freight train coming through here.”

Mr. Materka, 30, an engineer for the New York & Atlantic Railway, one of the few remaining short-line rail freight companies in the region, was running two screaming 120-ton diesel locomotives towing a string of sooty boxcars from Queens out to eastern Long Island. Well-dressed commuters looked up from their newspapers and coffee and stared as the smoky train roared by and transformed the suburban station into Tumbleweed Junction.

The line uses obscure rail tracks in Queens and Brooklyn and tracks of the Long Island Rail Road in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Since freight trains are far outnumbered by commuter trains, few people glimpse the bulky, graffiti-covered boxcars as they lumber past the sleek silver commuter cars rushing passengers to or from Pennsylvania Station.

But passengers can expect to see more of these trains soon. Transportation experts, government officials and rail freight advocates say conditions are suddenly in their favor.

New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, favors expanding rail freight, as does United States Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Mr. Nadler, a longtime champion of building a rail freight tunnel under New York Harbor to reduce truck traffic, helped obtain $100 million in federal money in 2005 to study the tunnel project, and his power has increased now that the Democrats have a majority in Congress.

Given that political climate, and the effect high fuel costs have on prices of goods trucked in, experts say they expect a huge increase in rail cargo in the New York area. The city gets roughly 2 percent of its goods by rail, compared with a 40 percent average figure nationally, experts say.

Also, a new waste management plan for New York City calls for more reliance on rail freight to ship waste out. The city is set to activate a rail freight line on Staten Island and is seeking to expand rail activity in Bay Ridge, where a short-line railroad floats rail cars from New Jersey across New York Harbor to Brooklyn to be picked up by New York & Atlantic.

Since taking over the Long Island Rail Road’s freight operation in 1997, New York & Atlantic has managed to navigate the tricky, obscure rail tracks in Queens and Brooklyn and dodge the thick traffic of the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country. Annual totals have increased to about 22,000 carloads last year from 9,000 in 1997.

This little-noticed suburban rail line has become the little engine that could, and proposed increases in rail freight could thrust it into a much larger role, as would plans to create new depots on Long Island to reduce truck traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

“Rail freight is expanding here and we’re going to grow with it,” said New York & Atlantic’s general manager, Mark Westerfield. “We’re connected to the national network, and the rest of the country relies on rail freight.”

Operations are limited by the size of the main yard at Fresh Pond Junction in Glendale, Queens, he said, and by the capacity and condition of the tracks, overpasses and aging signal systems for the line’s fleet of 13 locomotives, some of them a half-century old. Mr. Westerfield said he was seeking government money to help the railway expand operations.

The company has 10 years left on its exclusive contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for track use; after that, it has the right to renew for another 20 years, he said. One morning this month at the Fresh Pond yard, next to a neighborhood of homes, a crew connected the 50-foot-long hoppers and boxcars to be delivered to Long Island: baking flour headed to Lindenhurst, oats bound for Belmont Park racetrack, plastic pellets and bricks headed for Hicksville, and chicken feed for Eastport.

The conductor, Jeremy Lally, 31, of Bohemia, on Long Island, and his burly brakeman, Sean McCarthy, 29, of Huntington, swung on and off the train and threw hand switches, just as in old movies. Mr. Materka, of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, nimbly handled a set of old valves and heavy handles on the control stand, to maneuver the diesel from track to track, picking up the cars by ramming into their massive steel couplings.

The other two men hoisted themselves up the steep metal steps onto the hulking locomotive and along a catwalk into the engine’s cab, and soon the train was chugging east toward the Jamaica rail hub, carefully avoiding the path of oncoming rush-hour commuters speeding toward Penn Station.

The winter sun streaked through the locomotive cab’s narrow windows as Mr. Lally thumbed through his huge book of rail schedules to see which trains were ahead and behind them.

Passenger trains have priority, and the freight conductor’s biggest priority is finding gaps in the commuter train schedule. Mr. Lally constantly called and radioed to control towers to see when the train could pass through stations between commuter trains, while Mr. Materka pulled the near-deafening horn incessantly to warn cars and pedestrians at traffic crossings.

The freight line, with its 10 train crews on duty each day, serves about 80 businesses in Brooklyn and Queens and on Long Island. It extends to Bridgehampton on the South Fork of Long Island and Southold on the North Fork. Its cargo includes produce, lumber, asphalt, paper, plastics, rice, beer, onions, road salt, building materials, recyclables, chemicals, iron, steel.

Most cars come down from upstate New York or Connecticut through the Bronx, across the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River, and through Queens. They pass highways and dense urban landscape and, as the Manhattan skyline recedes, the scenery turns to a blur of backyards, ball fields and strip malls.

The locomotive is a 2,000-horsepower diesel, about 30 years old, with a 3,000-gallon diesel fuel capacity. Two or three locomotives are usually hitched together so that the huge train can accelerate to avoid the commuter trains.

The crew members hopped out to throw large levers connected to antiquated-looking track switches, to allow the train to enter various sidings and yards for deliveries and pickups.

Many spur lines and off-ramps are now rusted and overgrown, but lately the crew members have seen signs of revival, as some companies build new sidings to make way for rail service.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

December 31, 2006
Long-Ago Snow
By MITCH KELLER

ON Monday, Jan. 18, 1909, New Yorkers woke to a city transformed. A weekend storm of snow and sleet had left everything — the biggest trees and the smallest bushes, the trolley wires and street lamps — coated and gleaming with ice, as if made of glass. It was, wrote a reporter for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “as if the fairy queen of childhood days had waved her magic wand and transported us to the kingdom of ice and snow.”

“In Prospect Park,” the reporter continued, “the scenes witnessed were beyond description. Nothing like it has been seen for years, and thousands of persons walked through a perfect garden of wonder.”

We have a good idea what Prospect Park looked like that day because one of the thousands of Brooklynites who went there was a serious amateur photographer named Clinton Irving Jones. Using a 4-by-5 view camera, Mr. Jones took carefully composed photos of the scenes before him. They captured the ice sparkling on the trees like tiny holiday lights, the weaker trees bending under the burden of the ice on their branches, the tracks of the people who went to see it all.

In these photographs, which are on display at the Underbridge Pictures gallery in Dumbo through Jan. 28, Mr. Jones recorded the friendlier aspect of a winter storm, its visual beauty in a pastoral place. But his photos did not, of course, reflect the larger reality of that storm.

With the exception of the rare power blackout, nothing disrupts life in New York like a winter storm. This was especially true a century ago, long before conveniences like the Weather Channel and 24/7 takeout, and devices like computers and cellphones that make instant communication possible.

In those years, even a relatively modest storm like the one that transformed Prospect Park into the proverbial wonderland — several inches of snow and sleet, a little rain mixed in, followed by an ice-up — might play havoc with the lives of New Yorkers. When a warm home depended not on the turn of a thermostat dial but on the availability of coal at the grocer’s, and when milk was delivered each morning door to door, the inability of horse-drawn delivery vehicles to move about could mean days of hardship. Nor did it take much bad weather to disable the overhead wires that provided telephone and trolley service, or to seriously complicate the efforts of horse-drawn fire and rescue vehicles to reach people in need.

DURING the storm in January 1909, for instance, beyond the peaceful confines of Prospect Park, ice-laden trolley wires collapsed in many parts of the city, badly interfering with streetcar traffic and clogging up the streets. Horse-drawn trucks kept getting stuck, further hindering the streetcars, because the horses couldn’t advance in the ice and snow; at the Williamsburg Bridge, The Eagle reported, “The horses attached to a truck fell down and the cars were blocked from 7:35 to 7:55.”

In Long Island City, Queens, telephone wires collapsed onto trolley lines, causing “a big electrical display” and a traffic jam. In Manhattan, ice on the third rail was believed to have caused a short circuit that set fire to a car on the Sixth Avenue el. Back in Brooklyn, according to The Eagle, the weather “put almost the entire fire alarm system in the borough out of commission and created grave danger.”

Emanuel Brutto, a 30-year-old ship’s cook from Barbados, was found frozen to death beneath a tarpaulin in a truck on South Street. The New York Times reported that a barge captain had died of “apoplexy” during the storm, a condition caused, his crew said, by “anxiety for the safety of the barge.”

Then, as now, New York had a conspicuous population of homeless people, many hundreds of whom turned to the Department of Public Charities for shelter that weekend. “Practically all the men and women who applied for shelter were poorly clad, some miserably,” The Eagle said, “and many of them were suffering with frostbitten feet and hands.”

All things considered, New York’s winters are far from arduous, but the city has been struck by plenty of big storms over the years, many of them notable for one reason or another. The storm of last Feb. 11-12 brought the biggest official snowfall in the city’s history, 26.9 inches. The storm of Feb. 9-10, 1969, almost cost Mayor John Lindsay the next election because of his failure to clear the streets of Queens.

After the Blizzard of ’61, Mayor Robert Wagner banned cars in New York for almost a week, sealing off the city with police checkpoints. During the Depression, storms like the Blizzard of ’35 meant government-sponsored snow-removal jobs for thousands of unemployed men. The cleanup of the Blizzard of 1920 included the bizarre sight of soldiers from the chemical warfare service of the United States Army using fuel-spewing flamethrowers to melt snow and ice.

Then, of course, there was the legendary Blizzard of ’88. It is probable that no inhabitants of the area that is now New York, going all the way back to the Lenape Indians, ever had so hellacious an experience of winter as the New Yorkers of March 1888 did. It wasn’t so much the 21 inches of snow, a total surpassed not just last February but also on Dec. 26-27, 1947 (26.4 inches). It was more the winds gusting as high as 85 miles an hour and the single-digit temperatures, and of course the fact that the late-19th-century metropolis simply wasn’t sturdy enough to withstand the onslaught, the likes of which it could never have imagined.

Given modern New York’s far stronger infrastructure, mechanized snow removal and infinitely better communications, it is tempting to believe that no weather event could ever replace that one as the worst in New York history. But one effect of global warming, scientists say, may be more volatile weather, with storms that, if not greater in number, are more intense. So it is probably inadvisable to assume that the worst Mother Nature can inflict on New York has already occurred.

WRITTEN accounts of the Blizzard of ’88, which killed about 100 people in New York and 300 elsewhere, reveal a basic way in which people were different then. When New Yorkers woke up on the morning of Monday, March 12, and beheld what was clearly an awful and even dangerous day to go out — snow rapidly accumulating in big drifts, winds gusting at gale force, temperature in the low 20s and dropping — most of them seem not to have given much thought to staying home.

They did not have radios, of course, and could not really have known how much worse things were going to get. Beyond that, though, job protection and workers’ benefits were essentially unheard of. People were afraid, and rightly so, that if they didn’t show up for work, they would lose not just a day’s pay but their livelihood.

By that afternoon, New York had become virtually cut off from the rest of the world. The telephone, telegraph, electrical and fire alarm wires strung so precariously above the streets tumbled down. Service on the four elevated train lines was all but knocked out, stranding thousands.

Horse-drawn streetcars ground to a halt in the snow and were abandoned, a blessing to the homeless and the lost who took refuge in them. Horses got stuck in the massive drifts and froze to death, only their heads visible above the drifts. Large numbers of sparrows froze to death, too, their lifeless bodies dropping to the street or floating through the air on the wind.

Pedestrians became disoriented and fatigued in the blinding snow. The wind was unbelievable, the streets littered with people’s hats and headwear.

James Algeo, who lived on East 84th Street near the East River, wrote years later about how he and two companions got caught by a gust of wind as they crossed the intersection of Dey Street and Broadway. “I went sailing up Broadway and landed against the newsstand at Knox Hat Store,” he recalled. “One of my companions landed in the Western Union Building, the other went up Park Row and landed at the old World Building.”

New York’s streets at the time were notoriously filthy, and the faces of many pedestrians were left blotched and scratched not just by the searing, horizontally blowing snow, itself like tiny particles of glass raked against the skin, but also by the grit and trash that had lain on the streets and was wedged between the cobblestones.

Frostbite was a major problem. Police officers kept an eye on pedestrians’ ears, and if they saw a pair that looked too white, they took the person aside and rubbed the suspect ears with snow, in the mistaken belief that such an action would prevent frostbite.

Another old wives’ tale of the time was that alcohol was a good way to fortify oneself against the extreme cold. The city’s saloons were packed during the Blizzard of ’88, and many a pickled townsman made the mistake of trying to negotiate the perilous streets, only to end up floundering in a snowdrift. Not all were lucky enough to be pulled out while they were alive.

Clinton Irving Jones, the almost forgotten photographer of the New York ice storm of 1909, was a native of Tompkins County, far upstate, and it is not known if he was living in the city during the Blizzard of ’88. But his photos of Prospect Park suggest that as devastating as the storm was, he would have liked to be around for it.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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December 17, 2006
Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying

Relationship experts report that too many couples fail to ask each other critical questions before marrying. Here are a few key ones that couples should consider asking:

1) Have we discussed whether or not to have children, and if the answer is yes, who is going to be the primary care giver?

2) Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?

3) Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?

4) Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?

5) Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?

6) Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?

7) Will there be a television in the bedroom?

8) Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?

9) Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?

10) Do we like and respect each other’s friends?

11) Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?

12) What does my family do that annoys you?

13) Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?

14) If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?

15) Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

During Heat Waves, Backup Generators Serve as Saviors, and Big Polluters, Too
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: August 12, 2006

As searing heat stretched the New York metropolitan region's electric grid to its limits last week, utilities and elected officials appealed for less power use, and it seemed to work. Industry officials reported that residents and businesses had curbed demand substantially, helping the system avoid major problems.

But it was not all about raised thermostats, doused lights and workers sent home early. Part of the apparent drop in power use was, in fact, no drop at all -- just a shift to another, much dirtier source of electricity.

Hundreds of businesses and government agencies fired up diesel generators that produce much more pollution per watt of power output than power plants do. Air quality tends to be poorer in excessively hot weather, anyway, and the generators helped make it even more unhealthy for people across the metropolitan area to go outside and exercise, or even breathe the air for any length of time.

And that use of relatively small, very localized power sources -- known as ''distributed generation'' -- has become more common in recent years with the number of backup generators increasing sharply. Power companies and government agencies have encouraged their use in emergencies, which have become more frequent as surging demand tests the ability of power plants to produce enough electricity and the capacity of the wires to deliver it.

''You've got this tug of war between keeping the lights on, which is essential, and trying to limit the really serious environmental impacts when you go to distributed generation,'' said Richard M. Kessel, chairman of the Long Island Power Authority.

''You want to have the emergency backup in your back pocket, and try to put yourself in a position where you don't have to reach for it,'' he said. ''And you never, never want to have to use it on a regular basis.''

No one knows exactly how much backup power was used in the metropolitan area during the recent heat wave, but it probably topped 1,000 megawatts at its peak -- more than enough to power Buffalo and its suburbs. In a 2003 study, a consortium of eight Northeast states found more than 2,200 diesel generators just in New York City, with a capacity of 1,320 megawatts -- and several times that many generators in the surrounding region. One megawatt is enough to power about 1,000 homes.

The Department of Environmental Protection in New York City says it used up to 400 megawatts of generator power last week just at its sewage treatment plants, and there were also generators running at many other city facilities, like the Rikers Island jail and City Hall.

Big commercial power users in the city and Long Island that are in a program that provides financial incentives to rely less on the grid in a power crisis drew up to 235 megawatts from their generators at the height of the heat wave, according to the New York Independent System Operator, the agency that manages the state's power markets.And there were many other diesel generators working that were not part of the program.

Dozens of hospitals, colleges and office buildings in the city turned to generators after Con Edison and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appealed for relief for the city's fraying electrical system. Con Edison used generators to keep much of northwest Queens lit as crews repaired damaged power lines from the recent outage there, and it even used generators at its headquarters building in Greenwich Village during part of the heat wave. When much of downtown Stamford, Conn., lost electricity, several of the affected buildings powered up their generators.

Some buildings use generators that run on natural gas, which is a much cleaner fuel, but the great majority of them burn diesel.

Power plants built since 1970 are subject to stringent pollution controls. But rules for backup generators are far less strict, and, in most cases, there are no pollution restrictions for diesel generators not used more than 500 hours a year. The Pataki administration proposed new pollution rules several years ago, but they have not been put into effect.

Studies have shown that for each watt of power output, diesel generators produce up to 20 times as much particulate pollution, or soot, as the most advanced, natural gas-fired power plants, and up to 200 times as much nitrogen oxides, precursors to ozone, or smog. They even emit several times as much pollutants per watt of power output as the average power plants that burn oil or coal.

''This is pretty much the dirtiest source of electricity you can find,'' said Peter Iwanowicz, director of environmental health for the American Lung Association of New York State.

The federal government uses a measurement called the Air Quality Index to assess the level of pollution. A reading up to 50 is considered good, while 51 to 100 means there is a moderate health concern for people who are prone to be very sensitive to pollution, like those with severe asthma. An index reading of 101 to 150 means a significant risk to people with heart or lung disease, and even healthy people are warned to limit outdoor exertion. Any number above 150 means the air is unhealthy for everyone.

On the three worst days of the heat wave, Aug. 1-3, the Air Quality Index readings for ozone reached 99, 106 and 84 in New York City, and 146, 149 and 131 on Long Island, according to the State Department of Environmental Conservation. The soot levels hit 104, 106 and 94 in the city, and 92, 113 and 95 on Long Island.

''Those are pretty unusual levels, though they weren't unusual a few decades ago,'' said George D. Thurston, associate professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. ''When these pollutants are high, you see more hospital visits for respiratory conditions, a lot more people having asthma attacks, more heart attacks in people who already have heart problems, and more cardiac deaths.''

Government officials, power industry executives and environmentalists agree that the solution is a combination of new power plants, new transmission lines from other regions, more conservation and more use of renewable sources such as wind power. But they disagree on the details and on how much emphasis to give each element.

For now, emergency generators are widely seen as a necessary evil. Without them, the risk of a blackout would be higher in periods of extraordinary heat. And a blackout would mean even more generators running and, to make matters worse, sewage spills from treatment plants because they would not have enough power to function properly.

''We haven't invested nearly enough in efficiency and conservation, as well as new plants and power lines, so in a crisis like last week, you make the best of a set of bad choices,'' said Ashok Gupta, director of the air and energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council. ''You can't suddenly ask people just to sacrifice when it's very, very hot because we haven't done all the things we should have for years.''

Mr. Kessel pointed to the toll of at least 30 people around the region who died as a result of the heat wave. ''If the power goes out in a heat wave,'' he said, ''that number goes a lot higher.''