As many as 2,000 customers lost power in Greater Morristown on Friday evening, according to Jersey Central Power & Light, for reasons not immediately apparent.
A spokeswoman said the utility hoped to have electricity fully restored by 10 pm.
The majority of the affected customers–about 1,400–were in Morristown, and the rest, in Morris Township, according to the JCP&L website.
In Morristown, traffic lights were out along Maple and Macculloch avenues and Bank and Ann streets early in the evening.
Power first went down around 6:45 pm, followed by another outage at 8:10 pm that affected Morristown Medical Center. The hospital got power back at 8:25 pm, said JCP&L spokeswoman Tricia Ingraham.
“We don’t know the cause,” Ingraham said at 8:30 pm. A message from Morristown police indicated a transformer malfunction on James Street was to blame.
Sometime after 8 the JCP&L website was showing more than 8,000 out when counting Morristown and the Township.
Imagine being JCP&L, and having this one job, delivering electricity. And your delivery network goes down in the town that’s the county seat, including to the local hospital, and you just have no clue why it happened. JCP&L is CHEAP. Last time I was in Florida it was amazing just how prehistoric JCP&L/FirstEnergy is in comparison – I saw new transformers everywhere, smart meters, field units to measure usage/availability on all levels of their distribution system… And here, according to my JCP&L account, my Township outage from Friday still hasn’t been cleared. Mind boggling how cheap and inept these people are.