Overview
- At a Steglitz-Zehlendorf meeting, residents pressed Kai Wegner over his crisis response and his hour of tennis on the first day of the outage, with some demanding an apology.
- Wegner acknowledged he exercised during the blackout, insisted he was reachable by phone, and argued an early on-site visit would have offered optics rather than help.
- He announced plans to install video surveillance at neuralgic points of the power network as early as next week to better protect critical infrastructure.
- Wegner called for expanded powers for the city leader to declare a major incident in crises, a step now under discussion after disputes over the outage response, with the Senate set to revisit the issue Tuesday.
- Investigators attribute the January 3 outage to suspected arson by left-wing extremists that cut power to about 100,000 people, with full service restored by January 7.