Power is restored to most National Grid customers

The lights are back on for the 20,000 Northern New York residents who lost power at 1:28 p.m. when National Grid experienced a wide-spread transmission issue.

By 3:30 p.m., the estimated restoration time for many of the outages, the utility reported 238 customers without power. That’s down from a peak of 23,000.

The lunch hour was winding down at The Fairgrounds Inn on Coffeen Street when the power suddenly blinked off. Staff went outside to check for nearby traffic lights and reported back that they were off. What was surmised as a localized outage caused by a car accident, turned out to be much more widespread as people turned to social media to share their status. Almost immediately there were reports from Brownville to Alexandria Bay before the National Grid outage map showed any outage.

National Grid Spokesman Jared Paventi released the following statement: 

“National Grid is aware of a large-scale transmission outage affecting about 21,000 customers in Jefferson County. Our crews are actively working to restore customers by rerouting electricity on our distribution network. We expect to restore customers in the early evening hours.”

The cause is not yet known, but the utility company outage map shows a large portion of the southwestern side of Watertown extending to Cape Vincent, Lafargeville and Alexandria Bay. There are 27 active outages with 21,398 customers affected. The outage grew to 23,549 customers at 2 p.m. The outage map updates every five minutes. By 2:30 p.m. the map included the Village of Clayton.

Streetlights are also out on Arsenal Street and traffic is backed up in most areas. There is power in downtown Watertown.