Thousands of households in rural Delaware County lost power during the early morning hours on Saturday, January 4, in a NYSEG power outage that struck on the same night as a brutal cold snap.
The outage struck over 4,000 of NYSEG's customers in the county, according to a post on Facebook from the Downsville Volunteer Fire Department. Other reports on social media indicated that power outages occurred in Walton, Delhi, Hamden, Colchester, Bovina and possibly other towns in the county. The outages occurred around 2:30 a.m., and power was restored within a few hours.
Overnight temperatures reached well below zero in the region. The National Weather Service reported that at 9:22 a.m., a weather station measured -11 degrees in the town of Sidney.
As of the time of this post, no information about the outage was available from NYSEG, and a representative at the company's outage report line refused to take a message from a reporter. Efforts to reach Delaware County Emergency Services were also unsuccessful, and a dispatcher at the county Sheriff's Office had no information about the outages.
Update, Monday, 1/6/14: The cause of Saturday's outage was a problem with a substation transformer, according to NYSEG spokesperson Clayton Ellis. The outage lasted from 2:42 a.m. to 4:27 a.m., and affected 4,087 households, Ellis said.
From late Monday night through Wednesday, the forecast is calling for the coldest weather in a decade, with wind chills dipping down to 30 to 35 degrees below zero. Ellis said that if there are any outages, NYSEG will respond quickly.
"[Cold weather] puts a lot of additional stress on our system," Ellis said. "We are continually performing maintenance on our system to make sure it's ready to deliver the power customers need during this weather. If we do have problems, we'll be ready to respond and take care of them."
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