Weekend power outages impact Toms River, Lakewood, and Island Heights

A series of widespread outages that carried over through Thanksgiving and now Christmas and Hannukah still plague JCP&L, during some of the most inconvenient times.

Jim Murdoch

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Dec 30, 2024, 10:28 PM

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Updated 2 days ago

More power outages over the weekend affected towns such as Toms River, Lakewood, and Island Heights less than a week after an outage in Whiting left 5,000 people in the dark early Christmas Eve.

“I’m hoping they can plan a little better so it doesn’t have these effects, especially this time of year,” said Kelly Dugan of Toms River.

A series of widespread outages that carried over through Thanksgiving and now Christmas and Hannukah still plague JCP&L, during some of the most inconvenient times.

“When you talk about extreme cold like we had in Whiting on Christmas Eve or a holiday like last night in Lakewood, it’s even more frustrating and more impactful for our customers,” said JCPL spokesperson Chris Hoenig. “We have 18 circuits on some of the worst reliability in our service area, where we are upgrading wires and poles with bigger, stronger poles, bigger thicker wire to provide that added resiliency."

The JCPL $100 million improvement project includes regions like:

McGuire (Ocean and Burlington Counties), which will see new stronger wire and poles at a cost of $3.2 million.
Howell Township will receive substation animal guarding at $300,000.
In Monmouth Beach, replacing line insulators and animal guarding will cost $200,000.
In many other areas, the NJ Reliability Improvement Project will target those 18 unreliable circuits. It will include new stronger wires and poles and the addition of smart devices on lines at a cost of at least $95 million.

If you live in the JCPL footprint, you’ll likely see projects like one happening in Middletown Township coming to a neighborhood near you. This involves replacing older dilapidated poles with new stronger, thicker ones.

“This is not going to raise rates. We had our rate review that was approved early last year. That went into effect in June. That was our first rate raise increase in about four years,” said Hoenig.

The cause of the outages in Lakewood and Whiting remain under investigation.

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