MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Middletown and many parts of Monmouth County were plagued by power outages this past July 4th holiday weekend.
On Monday morning, Chris Hoenig, a media spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light, released what caused many of the outages.
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A Facebook rumor that teens shot a potato gun at a substation is fake, said Hoenig. Instead, here is what caused thousands of residents in Middletown and the surrounding area to lose power:
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Outage in Neptune July 4: On July 4, JCP&L had an outage in Neptune affecting 958 customers. “This was caused by foil balloons being released and becoming entangled in power lines – a topic we warn the public about multiple times each year,” said Hoenig, citing these warnings from JCP&L not to release balloons into the air for exact reasons like this.
16,500 lose power Saturday county-wide: “The big outage we had was on Saturday,” he said. “Just before 6:30 p.m., the failure of a piece of customer-owned equipment at Naval Weapons Station Earle resulted in an outage affecting approximately 16,500 JCP&L customers in northern Monmouth County.”
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That is what knocked out the traffic lights on Rt. 36 in Leonardo/Navesink Saturday afternoon into Saturday night.
“Power was restored to approximately 7,500 customers within 30 minutes and by 8:21 p.m. Saturday, the number of JCP&L customers affected was less than 1,300,” said Hoenig. “All customers were restored by approximately 9:00 p.m.”
Then, a car drove into an electric pole Sunday morning in Middletown, again knocking out power:
“Early Sunday morning (approximately 3 a.m. July 7), we did have a car-pole accident that initially affected approximately 1,200 customers in Middletown,” he said. “As is standard, we worked to isolate the damage and restore customers quickly. About 1,000 were back on by 5 a.m., with 20 customers being affected for the duration of the repairs.”
While Middletown Police described these as “rolling power outages,” Hoenig clarified that these are not technically “rolling” blackouts.
“Rolling blackouts insinuates capacity issues,” he said, and all the power outages this past weekend were caused by specific events — equipment failure, car into a pole, foil balloons. Unfortunately, it resulted in electric outages for thousands, especially during a dangerous heat/humidity wave when air conditioning was needed most, he said.
“I’m sure each of these outages felt even more impactful due to the heat and humidity,” said the JCP&L spokesman. “It’s frustrating on a comfortable day to lose power, and that frustration is only amplified when the weather is as stifling as it was this weekend.”
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