More than 18,000 people have lost power on Staten Island's East and South shores, and counting, as likely heat-related outages continue from yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, 1,200 were without power. Four electrical feeders are now down, and reports are coming in of sparking wires on Lily Pond Avenue, near the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, according to Con Edison.
Con Ed spokesman Bob McGee said he couldn't be certain without an official investigation, but told us, "It's a fairly good bet it has something to do with the sustained hot weather."
Con Ed has also reduced power to 138,000 homes and businesses in several Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods, "including Richmond Hill, Woodhaven, Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, Kew Gardens, Lindenwood, Howard Beach and Broad Channel, to protect equipment while fixing it," NBC New York reports. And over 5,000 PSEG customers are now without power on Long Island in Nassau County.
Both above-ground and underground cables have gone out of commission on Staten Island, and crews are deploying generators to restore service while repairpeople sort out the problem, McGee said. He said he could not speculate as to when the juice would be flowing anew, or whether there would be more outages. Asked why the outages are confined to Staten Island, he said, "There's no discrimination in terms of where a feeder may fail."
Speaking of which, part of Gothamist's Brooklyn HQ just browned out. Wonder what's up with that.
