(Photo: Manhattan during the blackout on July 13, 2019. Outages hit parts of the city again this week. Credit: @bethanymarz on Twitter)
Thousands of Con Ed customers in New York City lost power again this week amid record heat. These latest outages come on the heels of a blackout that hit part of Manhattan on Saturday.
Outages started on Tuesday and about 3,800 Staten Island customers were still without power on Wednesday, according to CBS New York. Coney Island, Gravesend, and Bath Beach experienced outages on Wednesday morning, the Brooklyn Paper reported.
This morning Con Ed released a statement saying that crews had restored power to more than 15,000 customers over the past 24 hours. On Thursday 1,800 remained without electricity.
Councilman Steven Matteo, who represents Staten Island, tweeted that equipment failure was the cause of the outages in that borough. High heat as well as storms bringing lightning and strong winds are affecting the system. The utility serves 3.4 million customers across a 604-square-mile territory.
Last Saturday 72,000 customers on Manhattan’s West Side, including Times Square, lost power for around five hours. Preliminary results of the energy company’s investigation showed that a failed relay protection system was the primary cause.
“The relay protection system is designed with redundancies to provide high levels of reliability,” the company said. “In this case, primary and backup relay systems did not isolate a faulted 13,000-volt distribution cable at West 64th Street and West End Avenue.”
Con Ed customers are likely to experience continuing issues in the days ahead as temperatures in the city rise.
“We expect that there could be service outages. Those things happen during heat waves,” Con Ed spokesman Mike Clendenin said Monday, PIX11’s Aliza Chasan reported. “Our crews are ready to respond. We are going to be prepared for this. It’s going to be intense.”