BROOKLYN — Thousands of businesses and homes were left in the dark suddenly when a blackout swept an area encompassing Dyker Heights, Gowanus, some parts of Park Slope, Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst, a Con Edison spokesman said.
But by 3:30 p.m. the power had been restored, he said later.
The outage took place sometime after 12 p.m., and affected 7,500 customers across a hub that Mike Clendenin, a spokesman for the electric utility, said was all serviced by an outage in an overhead loop that normally feeds many customers in the area.
Clendenin said that the cause appeared to be overhead wires that were taken down, and it was not clear whether or not it was directly related to weather. "It's hard to say exactly what caused it. It's too hard to tell," he said.
The outage came as a snowstorm was moving in on the city through Saturday night, and expected to bring up to 4 fresh inches of the white stuff to already snow-clogged streets.
While the citywide outages, not including the sudden disturbance, totalled about 2,500 systemwide on Saturday afternoon, many of which were caused by weather-related disturbances, manhole fires caused at times by including melting snow and salt trickling down from the salt-spreaders doing street clearance, he said.
The area affected included a dense residential area of Brooklyn.
Customers without power can report any outages to Con Ed on the Storm Central part of their website, or check the status of restoration at their outage map.
