Power Outages In Morris County May Last Days, JCP&L Says

MORRIS COUNTY, NJ — More than 2,000 homes across Morris County remain without power in the wake of the rainstorm that soaked New Jersey on Monday, causing flooding and road closures.

For some of the outages, power company officials are now saying it may be Wednesday before all service is restored.

This morning, utility spokesman Chris Hoenig said that the outages were all due to the early morning storm. In Morris County, more than 7,000 people were without power this morning due to a tree on a high-voltage transmission line. The tree "knocked out an entire substation," Hoenig said.

"First off, we understand how frustrating it is for the customers to be without power and truly appreciate their patience during the restoration. The Wednesday date is what we call a 'global' ETR – this is the time we expect for the final restorations. For the vast majority of customers, restoration will come much sooner than that," Hoenig told Patch.

According to JCP&L, the restoration process at this point in the storm is to tackle the outages from largest to smallest. This means that after high-voltage lines that bring power into the region are restored, as they were in Morris County, critical facilities such as hospitals and police stations are some of the first to be back up and running.

Following that, outages affecting the greatest number of customers will be restored first, allowing the vast majority of consumers without power to be restored well before Wednesday's global ETR.

From there, the company works its way down to outages that impact only one client. These single-customer outages are some of the more complex and time-consuming repairs, and they will drop the customer count by a factor of two.

"The volume and complexity of the damage our crews are facing are also factors. At 8:30 this morning, we had approx. 610 individual outage orders in our system between northern and central N.J., each of which needed to be assessed and prioritized. In a storm like this, one outage order will be touched multiple times – first, by a hazard responder who will arrive on the scene and make it safe for other crews; then, by the forestry crews who will come and clear the trees from the lines; finally, our line crews can follow in and make necessary repairs, such as hanging new wire and replacing broken poles. Each of these steps has the potential to take hours to complete," Hoenig said.

According to the Jersey Central Power & Light power outage map, there are currently 2,074 homes without power.

"To put the restoration effort into a little more perspective: we have 140 forestry workers and more than 200 line workers involved in this storm response today," Hoenig said.

"We expect to restore power to the majority of affected customers by Dec. 20, 2023, at 2:00 p.m.," Jersey Central Power & Light said. "We will provide restoration updates for specific locations as they become available on our outage map: http://spr.ly/NJOutageMap."

"Again, we appreciate our customers’ patience and understand their frustrations during a storm response like this. Our crews truly want nothing more than to get everyone back in power as fast as safely possible – I have seen firsthand how much it means to them when they’re able to close in a breaker and have the lights come back on for a neighborhood," Hoenig said.

This article has been updated with a statement from JCP&L spokesman Chris Hoenig.