About 16,000 residents in Middlesex County woke up with no power Saturday morning.

It took five hours for crews to restore power. Electricity came back on for residents around 3:00 p.m.

Town engineers say a short in the system caused the safety shutdown to kick in. South River buys their power from PSEG, but the town runs the system themselves.

Tom Noto of South River Electric Company says the timing for the outage didn't help as crews worked to restore power. "We had to get public service here which took a while because it was a weekend, and it took a while for them to figure out what was wrong," he said.