NEW YORK CITY — The nor’easter that slammed New York on the heels of Hurricane Sandy knocked power out to tens of thousands of customers across the region, Con Edison said Thursday.
The storm, which blasted into the city as New Yorkers were still recovering from last week's hurricane, put the 55,000 customers in the five boroughs and Westchester in the dark, officials said.
Approximately 75,000 total customers are now without power after the two storms, the utility said.
Those numbers include people who never regained power following Hurricane Sandy as well as people who had their power restored, only to lose it once again, officials said.
ConEdison estimates full restoration to most affected areas by this weekend, officials said.
The nor'easter hit Queens the hardest, resulting in about 22,000 outages since Hurricane Sandy hit the city October 29, officials said. There were about 6,500 outages reported in Brooklyn, and 4,000 each in The Bronx and on Staten Island.
Manhattan, which had endured a massive power outage to 230,000 customers following Sandy, only reported 140 as a result of Wednesday’s storm.
It’s unclear at this point who among those who lost power Wednesday had only recently regained it, Con Edison officials said. But most of the new outages were the result of downed power lines and not rising flood waters, as they were during Sandy, they added.
Jamaica, Queens, is one of the darkest neighborhoods in the city with just over 9,000 customers without power, according to ConEd's website. And some 5,600 customers are without power in Flushing, and 4,600 customers in Richmond Hill, according to the site.
Bob McGee, a utility spokesman, said an “army of crews,” some from out of state, worked through the night as best they could to restore power to those who had lost it in the storm and will continue to do so.
“It’s a massive response, but the need is there,” McGee said. “On top of all that suffering, now there’s this massive dumping of snow. It’s an exceptionally difficult and miserable circumstance.”
In the Rockaways, which was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy, more than 39,600 customers have no power, according to LIPA's website. The utility did not immediately respond to questions about how many of those outages were caused by the nor'easter and how many were left over from Sandy.
