Tropical Storm Isaias brought more than just high winds that took out trees Tuesday — it also resulted in the second-most outages of any weather event in Con Edison’s history, behind only Hurricane Sandy.
As of midnight Tuesday, 104,497 customers in New York City were out of service, including:
- 44,546 in Queens
- 27,179 on Staten Island
- 22,648 in the Bronx
- 10,057 in Brooklyn
- 67 in Manhattan
More than 130,000 customers in New York City were without service at one point during the evening.
A "customer" outage does not necessarily reflect one resident or household. For example, in some instances, a "customer" outage could reflect an entire residential building.
Queens and Staten Island continue to have the highest number of outages in the five boroughs. Con Ed says that's because there are more trees there to fall on power lines that are above ground.
The city has seen some improvements. Earlier in the evening, the utility reported over 32,000 outages on Staten Island, for example. And by midnight, the number of Con Ed customers still without power in Brooklyn was down more than half from the peak of more than 22,000 earlier in the day.
Among those waiting to have power restored were residents at a Red Hook New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) building who did not initially know they could have to wait days before electricity is returned.
A NYCHA spokesperson explained that the storm damaged two of the three main power lines that serve the building. The agency did not have an estimate on how long repairs would take and when power would restore.
Anyone can report an outage or request information by calling 1-800-75-CONED.
The biggest difference between outages during Isaias and Sandy has been in Manhattan, which consistently had the fewest outages throughout the day. Manhattan usually avoids widespread outages because its power lines are underground, but there were significant outages in Manhattan during Sandy after rising storm surges caused an explosion at an East River power plant.