NY City lights up after massive blackout

NEW YORK CITY: The city tried to regain its footing Sunday after the restoration of power from a massive blackout late into Saturday night amid questions of how the outage happened.

Utility company Con Edison said in a statement the final impacted customers from the outage – which affected more than 72,000 customers along 30 blocks from Times Square to the Upper West Side – had their power restored just before midnight after blackouts that began at 6:47 p.m. on Saturday, reports USA Today.

“Over the next several days and weeks, our engineers and planners will carefully examine the data and equipment performance relating to this event, and will share our findings with regulators and the public,” the company said in a statement on Sunday.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who deployed New York state troopers during the outage, said Sunday that he was going to tour the transformer that caused the power failure with Con Edison Chairman John McAvoy to figure out exactly what happened.

“We have to have a system that is designed to handle disruptions and rather than domino, we have a redundancy in this system so this doesn’t happen,” Cuomo said. “... And that’s what we’re going to work on and I want to see with my own Queens eyes the transformer that started it all.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio said police confirmed there was no foul play involved and that the outage was caused by a “mechanical issue.”

The outage, which came 42 years to the day after The Great Blackout of 1977 dimmed most of Manhattan, shut down Broadway shows and a Jennifer Lopez concert at Madison Square Garden, gridlocked streets as drivers attempted to navigate without traffic lights and left stunned tourists and residents wandering darkened sidewalks.