Shaun Morash: Mayor Mamdani, welcome into WFAN. I'm Shaun Morash. How are you?
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani: How's it going, Shaun? I was doing all right until I heard this Mitch news to be honest with you.
Morash: Yeah, and Mayor, I know we have to get to all of the heatwave stuff, but I do want to ask you - the fans of WFAN want to know - are we taking down the Mitchell Robinson street sign now?
Mayor Mamdani: I gotta be honest, I'm still a little bit in shock to give you any policy answers. I gotta take it back to the team, but I'm gonna miss that man. But I know that the reason that I'm on the show right now is to let New Yorkers know about just how hot it's gonna be this weekend and this week. We're talking about high 90s, triple digits through the Fourth of July - and with humidity that may feel like it's up to 112 degrees.
So, we're doing everything we can on our end. We're opening up hundreds of cooling centers across the five boroughs, whether it's the Javits Center to older adult centers to a number of libraries. We're gonna have directions to the closest center to you on a LinkNYC kiosk that you see when you walk outside. You can also find it at nyc.gov/beattheheat or call 3-1-1. We're also gonna be having 600 city workers and volunteers canvassing across the five boroughs to help anyone in need. And we're going to be doing all of this while, for the first time in New York City history, we're going to have a number of city workers checking in on seniors who people might be concerned about their health given the impact of this heat.
Morash: I saw the video you put out today which was tremendous, obviously a little levity to it as well. As far as obviously the homeless who might need help during this, if you see a homeless person in need during this heat, what should the New York City citizens do?
Mayor Mamdani: They should just call 3-1-1. You call 3-1-1, you let us know where they are, what your concern is. And I'll tell you, if you see someone or yourself - [if] it's more than [concerning] and you're experiencing any heat-related symptoms like nausea, vomiting, dizziness, confusion, then just go straight to 9-1-1. Because we wanna be clear with people: our city loses about 500 people a year to heat-related illness. We want everyone to take this very seriously. And what we're also trying to do is make it as easy as possible to stay cool. So, in addition to the cooling centers, we've also extended the hours at New York City public pools to 8:30 p.m. to ensure that there's a way to just cool down on such a hot day.
Morash: Nice. Okay. And just one more for me: Any concern about power outages, energy, anything going on with all these air conditioning and everything that we need here?
Mayor Mamdani: Yeah, so we've been doing a lot of work with ConEd and other utility systems to prepare for this because we know that reliability is a long-standing concern. So, they've been doing a lot of pre-work and a lot of just making sure they're ready to do the quick turnaround in case there's an outage. We've also informed business owners across the five boroughs to set their thermostats to 78 degrees just so that we don't have the immense kind of demand we sometimes see with this level of heat.
Shaun Morash: I appreciate it, Mr. Mayor. We'll get through this together in New York City. Have a happy Fourth of July.
Mayor Mamdani: Thank you. Same to you, my brother. All the best.
