MIDDLETOWN, NJ — In the past three days, a total of 325,000 Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) customers lost electric power, a JCP&L spokesman said Monday.
As of midday Monday, 39,000 customers are still currently without electricity, said JCP&L spokesman Chris Hoenig.
"We expect the vast majority that are still out to be restored by tomorrow (Tuesday)," he said.
"It's the tree damage that's driving everything," Hoenig said Monday. "We had hundreds of trees that came down; we've had hundreds of broken poles and miles of wire that need to be replaced due to tree damage."
JCP&L is the electric provider for mostly Central New Jersey and along the Jersey Shore. Thousands of PSE&G customers had outages as well. PSE&G serves the north part of New Jersey and the area around Trenton. At its peak on Saturday morning more than 230,000 homes and businesses were without service.
All the power outages across New Jersey this weekend were caused by thunderstorms and high winds, the companies said.
None of this weekend's power outages were caused by increased demand on the grid, or a surge in electricity use due to the heat wave, both PSE&G and JCP&L said.
In fact, in this most recent heat wave that just ended, JCP&L came close but did not hit its peak usage from the grid, said Hoenig. Peak usage for JCP&L customers was about 10 years ago, he estimated.
"If we did have a problem where there was not enough supply, we would first ask our largest industrial sites that pull power — such as a steel mill that we have in our service area, large industrial warehouses that have refrigeration — we would first ask them to start using their own back-up generators that they all have on site," Hoenig explained. "The very last resort is asking individual homeowners to conserve electricity. We did not reach that (demand) with this latest heat wave anyway."
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