The fact of the matter is that I was dismayed and frustrated and outraged as much as that commuter and others by the 12-day service disruption caused by Con Ed's failure to carry out its work and prepare adequately for the possibility of a…

I don't think, again, with all due respect, I'm satisfied that Con Ed is doing as much as it should to provide for the monetary compensation to Metro-North or to others who may have been harmed.

So if one of the feeder cables fails, or one of the substations fails, there will be a backup that--

Are you concerned that there may be the same vulnerability, Mr. Permut, with respect to other substations that exist in Connecticut?

there is an obligation. It certainly is an ethical, in my view, obligation, if not a legal obligation, for Con Ed to make whole, to compensate, to reimburse Metro-North and others who suffered as a result of Con Ed's failure of equipment.

Thank you, Mr. Ivey.

Because you had the contract authority from Congress to get that money out of the trust fund, as you've talked about, Senator Blumenthal, we built it.

the entire New Haven Line, when it comes to electric power, really is only as strong as its weakest point, because if the weakest point fails, as we saw in Mount Vernon, the entire line is crippled, correct?

Enough is enough. The outage due to the electrical problem obviously is a major failure, one for which the cause should be determined and the appropriate people held responsible.

The contingency plan, in other words, or the backup system would be solely Metro-North's responsibility. Is that your view?

I remain optimistic that we can get the job done.

One point is very clear, and that is that Con Ed should be reimbursing Metro-North, Amtrak, and others for all the costs that occurred in this service outage--$2 million a day is estimated to have been the cost for Metro-North, $62 million…

What was the cost of the 12 days of disrupted service?

I urge that there be an infrastructure bank as a means of providing that financing and, at the very least, that there be a national rail trust fund.

Do you agree, Commissioner?

The ripple effects were far reaching and profound.

Wouldn't it be fair to expect Amtrak to invest more?

The bottom line is $3 billion right now on the Connecticut side is a hefty investment in a state with the highest per capita debt in the Nation.

So let me just go back from that global line of questioning to more of the detailed questioning.

Now, increasingly, our economic vibrancy depends on people being able to access Fairfield County from New York by rail.

Connecticut and the Northeast deserve a fair share.

And the normal design life is 30 years.

And I apologize for putting it in sort of simplistic layman's language. But, in effect, the feeder cable, 6 years beyond its normal design life, was somehow impacted by this freezing which caused it to fail.

Thank you for your leadership on the issue.

It was your line that failed, was it not?