Tripped out substation to blame for Monmouth County JCP&L outage

It was a domino effect of outages at Monmouth County substations that plunged around 50,000 JCP&L customers into darkness late Wednesday afternoon.

JCP&L's outage map showed the most outages in Asbury Park, Neptune, Neptune City, Ocean Township, Belmar and Bradley Beach.

A substation that tripped in Neptune is to blame, according to JCP&L spokesman Christopher Hoenig.

"This one of the substations that takes a high voltage line, steps it down to a sub transmission level and then sends it out to other substations, which then steps it down to the distribution level where it goes out to houses," Hoenig told New Jersey 101.5.

As a result, several other substations were also temporarily knocked out. They began to be restored after 6 p.m. Bradley Beach and Neptune Township were the last to be fully restored.

The cause of the trip remained under investigation.

Hoenig said an outage in Bridgewater and Bedminster in Somerset County that knocked out power for nearly 4,000 customers was unrelated. It was caused by work to replacement of a wire that required power to be shut off in order to do the work.

Dan Alexander is a reporter for New Jersey 101.5. You can reach him at dan.alexander@townsquaremedia.com

Click here to contact an editor about feedback or a correction for this story.

25 costliest hurricanes of all time

Although the full extent of damage caused by Hurricane Ian in the Southwest is still being realized, Ian is already being called one of the costliest storms to ever hit the U.S. Stacker took a look at NOAA data to extrapolate the costliest U.S. hurricanes of all time.