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At a special condensed course for the media Wednesday designed to explain the workings of ConEd’s electric transmission and distribution system, the utility giant sent out more of the same messages it had been emitting throughout the 10-day blackout of Northwest Queens – it focuses on “the customer,” who in many cases is an apartment complex or high-rise business building, rather than on people.

“I don’t meant to be callous about it, but we’re not Big Brother, we don’t know how many people are actually living at a home,” said Michael Clendenin, director of media relations. “We aren’t going to ever know how many people are actually living in a household, but we do have an accurate count as to how many customers we might have out in a particular area.”

ConEd had been heavily criticized during the blackout for not knowing how many people had been affected by the outages. They explained at the time that they only know about individual customers being out of power as the customers call in to report outages.

When probed further about accounting for numbers of affected people in a blackout, in terms of working with the city for emergency response, Clendenin said that ConEd works with the city to handle such situations, but its focus during the blackout was to preserve the network and prevent a much worse situation from taking root.

Howard Sheard, a 26-year veteran with experience in distribution and substation operations, echoed a similar sentiment throughout his lecture to the group, twice emphasizing the public’s inability to understand certain issues and repeating numerous times that ConEd works with an inherited electrical system.

Northwest Queens has most of its transmission lines underground, which creates a very complex problem for monitoring. “It’s underground, it’s hidden, but it has oil, it has other components that have to be maintained,” Sheard said.

Clendenin said that the blackout causes are still under investigation and will mostly likely take months to complete. ConEd is currently in the process of examining whether or not Northwestern Queens needs a design change, which according to Clendenin, will get done if necessary.

“The short answer is that we’re looking at it,” Clendenin said. “The real answer is that we’re rebuilding that entire network, so, all of it, cables, transformers, manholes; everything that was damaged is going to be brand new, within weeks, if not months.”