Folks, go easy on HEI... it wouldn't have made a rats *** of difference whether or not he had paperwork signed off, stamped, and everything was in accordance with the "Blue Book" because ConEd ROUTINELY makes changes at whim. Go ahead... march in there with all your papers with ConEd stamps and all and go fight them... they'll just disconnect the power in the iterim until everything is ironed out.
What HEI is describing is not at all unusual here in NYC. Ripping out new, signed off work is just part of "life in the big city."
I'm willing to bet too that ConEd won't be connecting 500 MCM to MCM... they'll probably feed something like 2/0, perhaps even smaller. Then everyone wonders why everything was going up in flames in northwest Queens a couple of summers ago.
Perhaps most lamentable is how we here all seem to accept this...