Power nearly fully restored in Monmouth & Ocean counties following windstorm
Trees, power lines and transformers littered parts of Monmouth and Ocean counties following winds that topped 60 mph Sunday evening and into Monday.
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The lights are back on for just about all of the JCP&L customers who lost power during the holiday weekend windstorm.
Trees, power lines and transformers littered parts of Monmouth and Ocean counties following winds that topped 60 mph Sunday evening and into Monday.
“Right now, we are sitting at around 1,400 customers still out - that's 99% restored. We hit 85% in the first 12 hours, 95% 24 hours after the weather came through,” said JCP&L spokesperson Chris Hoenig.
Hoenig spoke with News 12 surrounded by employees in the storm control room at Bell Works in Holmdel. Here, they monitor the repair efforts and identify what areas need servicing first. Hoenig says millions of dollars in upgrades helped restore the nearly 112,000 affected Central Jersey customers in less than two days.
“Things like reclosers, trip savers which are like smart fuses that can detect an abnormality on the line and as soon as it clears so that tree branch that comes down that bounces off the line as soon as it clears that trip saver can close back in and reenergize the line keep the customers on.”
RELATED: High winds knock out power to thousands across New Jersey
Crews arrived on the scene of a broken telephone pole on Old Mill Road in Wall Township nearly two days after the windstorm. According to JCPL, that’s because according to repairs are based on need. The downed pole was not affecting any customers.
“Once we have the high voltage lines and critical facilities like hospitals, we focus largest outage to smallest,” said Hoenig.
Hoenig says this was one of the largest and most widespread windstorms to affect Monmouth and Ocean counties since Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020.
But unlike that storm, large areas of remaining outages have been reduced to an isolated home or two.
Hoenig says it’s the collaboration of partners from line technicians brought in from Ohio before the storm, to constant communication with local OEMs and mapping the damage here in the storm center – which helped restore power this time – in a much quicker fashion.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Hoenig says there are less than 400 JCP&L customers still without power in Monmouth and Ocean counties.
