O&R Restores Power to 52,000 after Evening Outage

Orange & Rockland Utilities officials issued a statement from headquarters in Pearl River after all the power was restored overnight to the tens of thousands who lost it north of Rockland County.

While there was some speculation last night that the power outage affected Indian Point nuclear power plant across the Hudson River, Entergy officials say it is not believed to have had an effect.

O&R restored power overnight to all of the more than 52,000 of its electric customers who lost their service yesterday evening as a result of an equipment failure in an O&R electric substation in Middletown, N.Y.

The equipment malfunction shut down electric service to 52,476 O&R customers at 7:20 p.m. yesterday in large portions of O&R’s service area in Orange and Sullivan counties in New York and Pike County in Pennsylvania. O&R electric crews were immediately activated and deployed into the field to perform service restoration.

By 3 a.m. today, O&R had restored electricity to more than 99 percent of the more than 52,000 customers affected. The final customers impacted by this event were back on by 5:30 a.m. today.

O&R crews responding to the O&R Shoemaker substation in Middletown last night to address the outage found that an overhead line failed which resulted in adjacent equipment automatically shutting down as well. That event took 13 electric substations offline throughout the area.

The root cause of the overhead line failure is not known at this time but a preliminary inspection of the adjacent equipment did not reveal any damage. An investigation by O&R into the root cause of the outage is continuing.

SEE: UPDATE: Control Rod Issue Shut Down 1 Indian Point Reactor