By LAUREN PEACOCK
For Montclair Local
PSE&G said Tuesday it’s still investigating the rolling blackouts that hit Montclair the two previous nights in sweltering heat.
“It was the same customers that experienced an outage Sunday and Monday night,” Rebecca Mazarella, a spokesperson for PSE&G said. “Sunday night was an hour and 45 minutes, and Monday night was less than 30 minutes, which shows that our teams are doing a really good job to redirect the power to get the customers back on track as quickly as possible.”
Mayor Sean M. Spiller took to Facebook both nights to update residents on the outages. He said Monday night’s outage occurred at 10:19, leaving 5,100 customers without power for 28 minutes due to a failed breaker. The prior night, he didn’t provide estimates on those affected.
As of Tuesday afternoon at around 5 p.m., PSE&G’s online power maps showed 90 Montclair customers without service. The utility serves about 19,000 customers in town.
Mazzarella also said the pace of restoration was heavily dependent on the weather.
“Having such high temperatures while trying to repair the damage is a challenge and something out of our control, but we are making sure everyone is safe while we work to fix the problem,” she said.
In Montclair, most residents’ breakers in their backyards, Mazzarella said.
“It’s always a challenge for people in Montclair when storms hit and trees are down because the damage in the neighborhoods are a different type of outage. We encourage our customers to report an outage instead of assuming others already did and stay connected with us.”
Outages can be reported by texting “Out” to “PSE&G” (47734).