Over 2,200 households and businesses in the East and South Shores of Staten Island lost power when a fire broke out in a substation on Tuesday night. The customers got their power back by Wednesday morning, as the city heads into a heat wave.
Resident Frank O'Connor told WCBS 2, “It went out around five o’clock but then came back on. Went off and on a couple more times and it went completely out."
The substation on South Railroad Avenue had a "smoking circuit breaker".
Power Outage
Fire in a Con Edison Substation - 1080 South Railroad Avenue.
2200 without power.— Steven Matteo (@StevenMatteo) July 16, 2019
Midland Beach Area Power Outage Update:
Con Edison is on scene conducting repairs. The cause of the outage is due to a circuit breaker smoking.
The substation has a redundancy alternate substation which kicks in once the host substation goes down.— Steven Matteo (@StevenMatteo) July 16, 2019
Another resident described how the outage was scattered in an interview with WABC 7, "It's crazy, my neighbor next door, his air conditioner is working but everything else is dead... My kitchen had no power, my dining room had power, my bathroom had some power. Everybody in this neighborhood is like that."
SI Power Outage Update: Con Ed still does not expect full restoration until 2am.
However they are trucking in two generators that will supply temporary power to most customers until a full fix is had.— Steven Matteo (@StevenMatteo) July 17, 2019
Power was back by 5 a.m., but City Council Member Steven Matteo pointed out another problem:
Staten Island Outage Update: @ConEdison reports that all necessary repair work has been completed and power has been restored to all customers affected by the outage.
However, 34 customers remain out of service due to a truck taking down wires and equipment.— Steven Matteo (@StevenMatteo) July 17, 2019
Speaking of downed lines, a few hundred customers in Kew Gardens, Queens are also without power because some poles were mysteriously knocked down.
Con Ed is facing heat from Governor Andrew Cuomo after Saturday's West Side blackout that left hundreds of thousands of people affected by an outage on Manhattan's West Side. The utility initially claimed that the "disturbance" at a Midtown substation couldn't have been caused a 13,000 volt cable issue on the Upper West Side, because the cable was too small to create such a huge outage... only to later say that the 13,000 volt cable appeared to be the culprit.
The governor said, "Blackouts cannot happen... in the city of New York. And they can't happen for no reason."
