A manhole cover popped in Morristown on Sunday evening, on Madison Avenue near the Route 287 overpass.
No injuries were reported, and power to Morristown Medical Center was not disrupted, said Acting Police Chief Darnell Richardson.
UPDATE: Some 880 customers in the Morris Township area were affected, said Jersey Central Power & Light spokesperson Lauren Siburkis. The incident occurred at 5:30 pm, and electricity was restored by 6:10 pm, she said. Siburkis did not have details about what caused the incident; we will update this story when information becomes available.
The stretch of Madison Avenue between South Street and the overpass was closed, and some residents in the town’s Historic District reported electrical outages.
The traffic light at Maple Avenue and Miller Road was out, and Morris Township firefighters responded to fire alarms triggered in professional buildings along Maple Avenue, while Morristown firemen attended to the manhole situation.
“There was a lot of white steam. It smelled like chemicals,” said town resident Mark Sutich, who was taking a walk in the area as emergency responders arrived.
A smoky underground cable failure in the same area, near the intersection of South Street and Madison Avenue, knocked out power to the hospital and nearly 900 residents in February 2019. A Morristown police officer was injured when a vehicle struck him while he was directing traffic at the scene.
Several years ago, Morristown’s downtown was plagued by underground electrical fires, power outages and exploding manhole covers. A motorist was injured in 2011, state authorities rapped JCP&L for failing to maintain the network, and the utility began upgrading the system.
If you search all the reports on First Energy having these problems, they seem to never actually come back and give any answers as to what the RFO was. I wish the town(s) would press them for better info and assess whether the cause seems reasonable or is just part of their FE’s general cost-cutting on maintenance.
We live near Windmill Pond/Lidgerwood Pkwy area and we had no power either. So not just Morris Township was affected. Many in Morristown were as well. Fortunately the power wasn’t disrupted for too long and even more importantly no one was injured. But these exploding manhole covers seem to still occur despite JCPL saying that problems have been fixed.