Power Line Failure Blamed in Early-Morning Outage

The failure of a power line connecting two Salem substations is being blamed for an early-morning power outage on Thursday that cut service to more than 10,000 electric customers, according to National Grid.

The outage occurred at about 1:25 a.m. on Thursday, according to National Grid spokesman David Graves, when a power line connecting National Grid’s Salem Harbor substation to a transmission line that feeds one of the other Salem substations failed, knocking out power.

About 11,600 customers were affected across the North Shore, including 7,700 homes and businesses in Salem.

Customers in Beverly, Lynn, Saugus and Swampscott were also affected.

Graves said National Grid restored power in stages by switching the supply from the West Salem substation to the customers without power.

At 1:55 a.m., 2,300 Salem customer got their power back and at 2:11 a.m. another 2,600 customers in Salem got their power back. The rest of the Salem customers that lost power had it back at 2:20 a.m.