De Blasio: New York blackout ‘handled well’ though he was away in Iowa

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has brushed off criticism that he was in Iowa campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination on Saturday when a blackout left some 72,000 Manhattan residents without power for around five hours.

Related: Heart of New York goes dark as Manhattan suffers power outage

The outage was “handled well” from afar, the mayor said.

Neighborhoods from the tourist hub of Times Square to the residential Upper West Side were affected by the outage, which was attributed to a problem at a substation. It did not result in any injuries, De Blasio said.

New York’s fire department said there were numerous reports of people stuck in elevators. The loss of power also knocked out traffic signals, spurring street closures, and disrupted subway service. Some Broadway theaters closed, police said. Videos posted to social media showed cast members performing on the street for attendees whose evenings were cut short.

A Jennifer Lopez concert at Madison Square Garden was canceled. After power was restored, Lopez advised on Twitter: “ANNOUNCEMENT: Gonna take more than a city-wide blackout to shut us down! Rescheduling the show for Monday night!”

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, De Blasio was asked about a comment from Andrew Cuomo, a longtime rival within the Democratic party.

“Mayors are important,” the New York governor said on Saturday night. “And situations like this come up, you know. And you have to be on-site.”

De Blasio’s campaign for president has not resonated with Democratic voters, leading the CNN host Jake Tapper to ask: “What do you say to constituents who say, ‘Hey, we elected you to run New York City – not to go to Iowa for a quixotic presidential campaign?”

“I am responsible for making sure that everything in New York City is handled quickly, handled well,” De Blasio said, praising police, firefighters and other public safety workers’ response to the blackout, which took place on the anniversary of a famous 1977 blackout that brought the whole city to a halt.

“I want to say the whole team responded immediately the way everyone has been trained to do.

“When you’re a mayor or a governor, you’re going to travel for a variety of reasons. The important thing is to have a hand on the wheel 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.”

“A CEO … public sector, private sector, has to be able to lead wherever they were and we got this done,” he said.

Tapper asked De Blasio if the incident suggested New York’s electrical grid was vulnerable to attack or failure.

“We haven’t had many incidents like this in recent years,” said the mayor. “And that’s a very good thing.”

“Our first responders did an amazing job,” he said. “Everyone did their job and went and got help to people right away.

“We’re going to look at this very carefully … We’re going to make sure there’s a very careful review of what happened. We don’t ever want to see it happen again.”

Cuomo said “this is not going to be a question, I believe, of ageing infrastructure” and had stern words for Con Edison, the utility company.

“This is not the first time I have been with [chairman] Mr McAvoy going to look at a substation that failed, right?” he said. “I have seen this movie. And the system has to be designed in a way so that if one substation fails it does not domino. It does not ripple. And we have to have a system that has redundancy and has backups.

“So, this is a potentially very dangerous situation and we have to make sure it does not happen again, and the system is designed in such a way that it does not happen again.”

McAvoy said shortly after power was restored there was “nothing to indicate other parts of the network were imperiled.

“That being said, we have not done the root cause analysis that will identify exactly what caused this outage so you can’t exclude that until you actually know what the conditions were that caused this.”

On Sunday, Con Ed’s president, Tim Cawley, said the power outage was still under investigation but did not have anything to do with demand on the electrical grid. The company is prepared for high demand, he said, like that expected this coming week as temperatures rise.

The New York senator Charles Schumer, meanwhile, said the federal Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity should investigate work being done by Con Edison to maintain and upgrade the grid.