Another Widespread Power Outage In Greenport Wednesday Morning

GREENPORT, NY - The lights went out in Greenport again Wednesday morning, the second time in just over a week.

The outage affected the entire village but was short-lived, beginning just after 11 a.m. and ending within the hour.

According to Greenport Village Trustee Doug Roberts, the outage was a PSEG issue. I am told by our team that there was a fault up at the PSEG construction site, but the problem has been fixed and PSEG reports that everything is stable," he wrote on his Facebook page.

According to Elizabeth Flagler, media rep for PSEG, the outage in Greenport was due to a trip on the circuit. "There were 2,179 customers affected for 13 minutes. The cause is under investigation," she said.

Greenport Mayor George Hubbard did not immediately return a request for comment.

The last power outage, on April 18, began at approximately 9:30 a.m. According to a release by the Village of Greenport, the PSEG breaker at the Southold substation "tripped open," which sparked the lack of power village-wide.

"Every possible, visible cause on the village side was inspected and found to be in working order," the village release said.

The village simultaneously contacted the operations department at PSEG, which resulted in a sub-stations operations specialist being dispatched to the Southold substation. The PSEG employee confirmed that had tripped open and an emergency service specialist was dispatched to perform switching and troubleshoot the location of the damaged equipment, the release said.

Subsequent to the switching operation, it was determined that the cause of the circuit breaker tripping was a faulted PSEG cable, the village said. PSEG then performed additional switching to restore power to the village by just before noon, after three hours.

According to Elizabeth Flagler, PSEG media representative, the loss of power was due to a "fault in the supply" from PSEG into the village. "We isolated it and power was restored at 11:48 a.m.," she said.

Residents turned to social media to question what had happened to spark the widespread outage. Trustee Mary Bess Phillips posted that she was at Village Hall, where all power was also out, trying to find an answer.

Greenport Village Mayor George Hubbard said the power coming from PSEG "tripped out"; PSEG, he said, sent a person to the Southold substation but that individual was unable to reset the breaker so another individual was sent.

The first power outage left business owners frustrated. "It is hard to figure out what to do when no one knows anything. We are heading into our shop but we have no power there, either," said Rena Wilhelm, the owner of a Front Street shop. "This is not the first time we have lost revenue on account of unexplained power outages."