You might have noticed your lights flickering last night or even going complete dark as a temporary power outage struck areas of NYC last night. The outage was a result of an explosion observed at a Brooklyn ConEdison substation. Following the temporary outage, power resumed as normal.
To be more specific, the DUMBO substation experienced “a fault on a high-tension transmission line.” It occurred around midnight. Con Edison explained the situation in the statement below.
Last night, just before midnight, a piece of high voltage electric equipment failed in the substation, basically a short circuited that caused a large flash that was seen by some residents around the neighborhood, the protection which are basically breakers or like the circuit breakers in your house, just much bigger, they opened up the isolate that piece of equipment, there was a voltage dip, essentially, people saw a flicker in their lights for about a second a little bit before midnight, and then voltage recovered or kind of went back to normal. — Con Edison President Matt Ketschke.
Outages were experienced throughout the five boroughs, and potentially even parts of Long Island, Westchester County and New Jersey as the electrical system is very interconnected. A total of 10 elevator rescues were made across NYC. The LIRR reported momentary service issues on elevators and escalators at Grand Central. Plus, certain subway service had ceased.
Police reports describing an observed explosion at the substation were made prior to the citywide power outage as ConEdison employees were busy fixing a transmission line.
There were no injuries reported and no criminality suspected. However, ConEdison shared to X earlier this morning that they are still investigating.