New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has defended being 1,000-miles away in Iowa when 73,000 New Yorkers were left without power during a blackout on Saturday night.
The mayor was left tweeting about the crisis on Saturday night as he went about his 2020 presidential election campaign in Iowa.
But as it became clear the blackout was going to last for several hours, the mayor decided to return back to New York in the early hours of Sunday morning.
In a press conference held on Sunday afternoon on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which had been plunged into darkness for hours the night before, the mayor insisted he took charge of the situation despite being a three-hour flight away.
‘When I heard about the incident I was waiting to understand what was going on,’ the mayor said.
‘The most important thing was to get a clear picture, and once it was clear it was going to take some time, I started back [from Iowa] immediately. In this job you have to take charge wherever you are, and I did that.’
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has been criticized for being out of town campaigning in Iowa while Manhattan was plunged into darkness by a blackout
Earlier on Sunday, he told CNN that he still had his ‘hand on the wheel’ thanks to ‘top officials’ who remained in the city while he was out of town.
‘I am responsible for making sure everything in New York City is handled and handled well,’ he told the network claiming that all the required information got to those who needed it.
‘The whole team responded immediately the way everyone is trained to do,’ he said.
He made no apologies for his being out of town.
‘When you’re a mayor or a governor, you’re going to travel for a variety of reasons,’ de Blasio said.
‘The important thing is to have the hand on the wheel and make sure things are moving effectively and communicate to people even from where I was. I was able to do that right away with the people in New York City.’
The 2020 candidate for president was on the campaign trail in Waterloo when power outages struck a wide swath of Manhattan in the early evening Saturday
Mayor de Blasio said he was ‘taking charge’ of the situation in New York 1,000 miles in Iowa
Later on Saturday night, the mayor tweeted several messages, indicating he was monitoring the situation.
‘With the power back on, I’ve directed City agencies to investigate this evening’s blackout,’ he wrote. ‘They’ll work with ConEd to get to the bottom of what happened tonight and prevent another widespread outage like this.’
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was less forgiving with de Blasio’s whereabouts.
‘I can count the number of times I leave the state basically on my fingers,’ Cuomo told CNN.
‘Mayors are important. And situations like this come up, you know. And you have to be on-site,’ he said.
‘I think it’s important to be in a place where you can always respond. But look, everybody makes their own political judgment and I’m not going to second-guess anyone either. I do my job the way I think I should do my job and I leave it to others to do the same.’
Power outages were reported across swathes of Manhattan including the Upper West Side and parts of Midtown Manhattan
A large section of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Midtown neighborhoods are seen in darkness from above during Saturday’s major power outage
The mayor also came in for a bashing from fellow Twitter users who criticized his slow return
‘This could have been much worse,’ Cuomo added, commending emergency responders. ‘When things are at their worst New Yorkers are at their best.’
The mayor also came in for criticism from fellow Twitter users.
‘Day late and a dollar short buddy,’ wrote one about the mayors’ slow return to the city.
‘Don’t you have important business to attend to in Iowa?’ asked another.
‘You run this City so terribly even the Electricity is trying to leave!’ added a third.
Around 60 blocks off Midtown Manhattan was without electricity for five hours.
Many people were trapped in elevators or stuck on subways while Times Square’s famous billboards went dark.
Hizzoner was in an auto workers’ union hall in Waterloo, Iowa, on the latest stop of his campaign.
The mayor eventually decided to abandon his campaign stops and returned to the city late on Saturday night.
De Blasio, is a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination in a large field of competitors and is polling at 0.3%, according to the latest polls.
On Sunday, he promised a full review of the blackout which struck on the 42nd anniversary of the 1977 one.
‘We haven’t had many instances like this in many years,’ he said, praising the ‘great job’ by first responders. ‘We’re going to look at this very carefully and review what happened.’ he said.