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Having lost confidence in Con Ed, the City may use 311 calls and other means to track future blackouts and coordinate its response, Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Joe Bruno said Tuesday.

Using data obtained from resident calls, the City wants to create real-time maps that log the time and location of complaints, giving emergency agencies a better impression of affected areas, Bruno said.

Councilwoman Melinda Katz (D-Forest Hills), chair of the Land Use Committee and sometimes critic of 311, said the automated call system already allows for the electronic compiling and tracking of information. Both she and Bruno expressed confidence that the new commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Paul Cosgrave, could soon develop a visual platform to help authorities react to blackouts and other disasters.

During the first three days of the nine-day Queens blackout, power outage-related complaints to 311 jumped from 944 to 4,800, Bruno said. City records show that 311 received only 100-200 such complaints a day during the previous week.

The spike did not raise red flags because the numbers were still consistent with Con Ed estimates of impacted customers, which hovered around 2,000 at the time. Calls were logged as electricity complaints and then forwarded to the party that usually handles those complaints – Con Ed.

But Con Ed officials have since admitted that their call receiving system – by which it usually determines the extent of power outages – did not function efficiently. In retrospect, it would have been better to verify the scope of the blackout independently, Bruno said.

“As we know now, they don’t have a good way of determining customer impact,” Bruno said of Con Ed. “That is obvious.”

Bruno said he started to suspect the blackout was larger than originally reported on the morning of the fourth day, when accounts from local officials, police officers and residents indicated a much wider section of the population had lost power.

Learning from the Queens blackout, Bruno said the City had formed a task force called the Power Outage Response Team, which uses staff from the NYPD, FDNY and OEM to canvas neighborhoods and produce its own estimate of impacted residents. PORT, as it is called, uses flyovers, door-to-door interviews and Census data to create an accurate picture of the extent of a blackout, he said.

The team is deployed when Con Ed suggests more than 1,000 customers have been affected. Since the end of the Queens blackout on July 26, it has responded to seven other outages.

“With this first-hand information, we can better understand the scope and impact of the outage and deploy all necessary assets to the scene to assist those residents in need,” Bruno said in testimony to the City Council at a hearing Tuesday. “While we hope an outage of this scale never occurs again, please be assured that we are prepared to handle it or any other emergency the City may face.”

At the hearing, some political officials questioned OEM for relying solely on the word of Con Ed, a company they said has a history of deceiving the public. But all agreed that the OEM responded admirably once the true extend of the blackout became apparent.

“They were like the allies landing at Normandy,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria).

Vallone and others continued to take shots at Con Ed, accusing them of either purposefully misleading the public or simply being incompetent. Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Sunnyside) said that while the media and the public have settled on the figure of 100,000 affected residents, he believes that number could actually be much higher.

The Council will hold four more public hearings about the blackout. The Public Service Commission and Con Edison are both working on final reports that may explain why the Long Island City grid failed while others continued to function.

“We need to go out and ensure the public this won’t happen again,” Gioia said.