Two power failures darken 20,000 Jersey City homes

08/29/00

By Jason Fink Journal staff writer

The lights went out on more than 20,000 homes in Jersey City early yesterday morning as two separate power failures cut electricity through much of the city, officials with Public Service Electric & Gas said yesterday.

As of last night, PSE&G officials had not been able to determine the cause of either power outage but spokeswoman Joey Anderson said that officials with the company - which provides electricity to most of Hudson County - had managed to rule out the possibility that the stormy weather affected service.

The first blackout, reported at 12:45 a.m., affected about22,100 customers from Garfield Avenue to West Side Avenue and from Duncan Avenue south to Gates Avenue, said Anderson. An equipment failure at a substation on Garfield and Harmon Street appeared to be the cause of the problem, reports said.

By 3:50 a.m., approximately 8,000 customers had their power back on, said Anderson. The remaining 14,100 were in the dark until 4 a.m., she said.

One hour later, at 4:50 a.m., approximately 14,100 customers in the same area - between Ocean Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive - lost power once again, Anderson said. In the second case, several network circuits failed for an unknown reason, officials said. Service was restored to all but a handful of customers by 7:40 a.m., according to reports. Officials said the remaining homes had power by 1:50 p.m.

Anderson said she did not believe the blackouts were related.

As of yesterday evening, however, Anderson said some customers on Kensington Avenue between Kennedy Boulevard and Bergen Avenue were still reporting outages.

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-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), August 30, 2000