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Thursday (Dec. 14), just before midnight, New Yorkers noticed their lights suddenly flicker for no reason, and while many brushed it off as something in their home going haywire, it turns out that the issue was much bigger than anyone realized.
According to the Gothamist, a small explosion at a Con Edison substation in Brooklyn, New York, was responsible for the flickering lights across the boroughs. Though some homes only experienced a minor inconvenience, many other neighborhoods suffered blackouts for a few seconds before power came back on. That must’ve been hella scary for residents not knowing if it was 2003 all over again in which New York and other states in the Northeast went dark for an entire day.
Gothamist reports:
Con Edison blamed a “fault on a high-tension transmission line” for the five or 10-second outage that residents noticed just before midnight.
“Our crews are investigating and making necessary repairs,” the statement said.
NYPD officials said Con Edison workers were restoring a transmission line at a substation on John Street in DUMBO when a disruption occurred and caused power to surge.
No injuries were reported, and officials said the brief outage that followed did not disrupt essential services at hospitals.
Luckily, no one was hurt in the Con Edison blast. A few people, however, found themselves stuck in elevators at the time. Thank goodness for the fire department that handled those situations.
Were you affected by last night’s power outage? Let us know in the comments section below.
