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Light Drizzle Fog/Mist The lights come back on in Long Beach
PSEG responds to back-to-back power outages
Thousands of Long Beach residents were in the dark on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday morning, after two separate incidents caused widespread power outages throughout the city and other parts of the barrier island.
On Tuesday night, PSEG Long Island spokesman Jeffrey Weir said that more than 8,500 customers were without power for 34 minutes.
“It went in waves,” Weir told the Herald on Wednesday.
At Tuesday’s council meeting, City Manager Jack Schnirman and other officials updated residents about the power failure, and some gathered by the windows on the sixth floor of City Hall and observed a darkened stretch of Park Avenue and other parts of Long Beach.
Weir said Tuesday’s outage was caused by a “voltage differential” at a PSEG substation on Park Avenue, which caused an electrical surge.
The city provided updates throughout the day on Wednesday as well, after PSEG experienced yet another power outage, this one beginning at around 6 a.m. and affecting approximately 6,000 customers.
The outages caused problems for some Long Island Rail Road commuters, since ticket machines were out and purchases couldn’t be made at the ticket windows, Weir said. The Long Beach School District announced on its website that power was back in all schools Wednesday morning, and operated on a normal school day. Busses transported students to Lindell as scheduled, the district said.
Weir said that the four-hour outage on Wednesday lasted until 10:55 a.m., and was caused by a faulty underground cable at West Park Avenue and National Boulevard. Weir said that PSEG is investigating the outage, but said he didn’t believe it was related to any work in the area.
“It could be the age, or that something happened to the line at some point, or saltwater, but it’s under investigation,” Weir said. “We were communicating with the city during the duration.”
East Beech Street resident Alyson Goodman said that only one side of her block was without power on Wednesday.
“I was hoping it would just be a quick outage like Tuesday night’s — we had no power for 10 minutes — but when I left for work at 7:30 this morning, we still had no power,” she said.
