Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gained national stature during the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center, said that officials can’t quickly restore power to New York City because President Obama and environmentalists have fought upgrading energy infrastructure.
“This is supposed to be a modern country,” Giuliani said on Fox last night. “It shouldn’t take us four or five days to put the power back on if we had sufficient infrastructure to bring that power to us.”
The former mayor, who also ran for president as a Republican in 2008, blamed Obama for that infrastructure deficit. “The systemic problem that we have however is we don’t have enough energy and we don’t have modern sources of infrastructure for energy, we haven’t built them,” Giuliani said.
“And we haven’t built them because there is so much darn opposition — usually very excessive environmental groups that make it impossible to build a new generator, build a new nuclear power plan, extend new transmission lines any place you want to extend transmission lines,” he added. “The president killed the single-easiest one you could have done, the Keystone pipeline.”
Some New Yorkers won’t have power until November 10th or even the 11th. “[Long Island Power Authority] should be brought up on charges,” city Councilman James Sanders told the New York Daily News. “LIPA has failed the people of the Rockaways.”
Giuliani faulted Obama for visiting New Jersey, but not New York City. “He didn’t visit breezy point, he didn’t visit rockaway — any of those places that were really terribly hit by it and are really suffering mightily,” he said. “Eighty homes lost, people dying, people out of their homes — it’s a disaster.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained that scheduling decision earlier this week. “The White House and Mayor Bloomberg [agreed] that because of the unique nature of the damage to Lower Manhattan and the resources that need to be brought to bear there, that it was not appropriate for the President to visit Manhattan today,” he said.
But Bloomberg has decided to carry on with the New York City Marathon.
