ROSEBANK — During the peak of high temperatures on Saturday afternoon, 4,200 homes and businesses in western Staten Island were without electricity, a Con Ed official said.
St. George, Tompkinsville, Park Hill, Stapleton, Grant City, New Dorp, Fox Hills, Dongan Hills, Midland Beach, and Rosebank were all impacted either by outages or a voltage reduction, the official said, though service was restored by 11 a.m. Sunday.
The utility company had reduced voltage early Saturday to 61,000 customers after an overnight manhole fire near the Fox Hills substation, according to a spokesman and a press release, but in attempting to repair the issue by taking the load off using backup feeders, an additional feeder was taken out.
The reduced voltage continued Sunday even after service had been restored.
Con Ed spokesman Robert McGee said until the utility notified customers that the repairs had been completed, the request for conservation of any non-emergency use of electricity would continue.
The manhole, at Clifton Avenue and Colton Street, first erupted Friday night across the street from the substation, causing an initial outage to more than 1,000 customers, McGee explained. Though 500 had been restored as of Saturday morning, the newest outage took out an additional 2,800 customers.
The outage wasn't directly related to heat problems with the manhole, but the burden on the system would make it hard to institute the voltage reduction the utility needed.
"We request people don't use energy unless it's absolutely an emergency," said McGee.
