Electric leaks shocking New Yorkers

NEW YORK — On the shelves at Trixie & Peanut, a boutique in Manhattan, are indulgences for dog owners concerned with image: pink-sequined tank tops, moss-green lizard-skin collars, rhinestone barrettes shaped like tiny bones. Then there are specialty products for a different kind of shopper: people who don't want their pet to be electrocuted.

For them, the shop's owner recommends $79 boots with thick rubber soles that might protect pets if they should walk over one of the city's unpredictable sites of "stray voltage."

Add this to your list of urban anxieties: In late winter, when salt mixes with slush, electric current escaping through uninsulated wires can be conducted up to the street through manholes, streetlights, service boxes, grates or sidewalk cracks.

New Yorkers became painfully aware of the phenomenon two winters ago, when Jodie Lane, 30, was electrocuted while walking her dogs in the East Village.

But dogs, whose skin is in contact with the ground, have known it all along.

For years, Garrett Rosso wrote it off as eccentric behavior on the part of his Rhodesian ridgebacks, Java and Kai. They would startle suddenly and run ahead, or yelp at the lamppost, or strain on the leash, refusing to go near certain spots on the sidewalk near his apartment.

Paul Schwartz, an East Side veterinarian, would see dogs with burned feet. At the time, "I chalked it up to God only knows what disease. Now that it's happened year after year after year," he said, he knows the cause is stray voltage.

New Yorkers were reminded of the phenomenon last week, when a chow-collie mix named Barkis was electrocuted near Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

The dog's owner, Danny Kapilian, was walking Barkis when the dog "started yelping and jumping" and lunged into the street. Assuming the dog was reacting to rock salt on the street, Kapilian bent down to wipe his paws. For a moment, Barkis seemed calm. Then he went into a fury so violent that Kapilian was afraid his sweet-natured dog would attack him.

Barkis then went into convulsions. When two animal technicians reached down to try to move Barkis, they, too, were shocked.

As it turned out, Barkis had walked over a section of sidewalk conducting 70 volts of electricity intended to power a streetlight — which had been removed in 1999. Con Edison had been informed that the city planned to remove the streetlight but had not discontinued the electricity supply, said Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for the utility company.

At the heart of the problem is the aging infrastructure of a densely built city in which nearly all electrical wiring is underground. After Lane's death, Con Edison began testing hundreds of thousands of sites each year for stray voltage, which typically escapes when casing around wires has disintegrated or corroded.

Surveys of 435,000 pieces of equipment in 2004 turned up more than 1,400 sources of stray voltage, which then were repaired. Last year, a survey of more than 730,000 sites turned up about 1,100 sources of stray voltage, most of them streetlights, overwhelmingly in the outer boroughs of the city.

After this month's blizzard came a cluster of electric shocks: Four pedestrians, including a 15-year-old runway model, were stunned while walking near Times Square on Feb. 11; Barkis died a few days later; on Thursday, a Brooklyn dog trainer was shocked while walking over a manhole belonging to a private company.

Clendenin said Con Edison's safety record is among the best in the nation for electric delivery systems. "We know there is some risk in delivering electricity," he said. "We strive every day to deliver it as safely as humanly possible."