Tens of thousands of residents across the New York and New Jersey area woke up without power Tuesday morning after severe overnight storms and damaging winds battered the region. A wind advisory was issued for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut through 8:00 a.m. EDT as utility crews mobilized to assess the damage and restore the grid.
The widespread blackouts have severely disrupted daily living and morning commutes across the Tri-State Area. As of 6:00 a.m., utility companies reported significant outages, including 14,466 PSEG Long Island customers, 12,459 JCP&L customers, 11,903 PSE&G customers, 3,644 Orange & Rockland customers, and 1,297 Con Edison customers. The extreme weather brought peak wind gusts of 72 mph at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City and 71 mph in Newark, New Jersey.
Downed trees and debris caused immediate safety hazards and localized transit delays. NJ Transit was forced to temporarily suspend its North Jersey Coast and Morris & Essex lines early Tuesday due to trees falling on overhead wires, with service beginning to resume around 6:30 a.m. Property damage was recorded throughout the region, including a tree crushing a car in the Bronx and another falling onto a house in South Plainfield, New Jersey. According to CBS News, the National Weather Service also issued a rare late-night tornado warning for Monmouth and Ocean counties during the storm.
The extreme local weather marks the tail-end of a massive storm system that has tracked across the Midwest and East Coast since Monday. According to Fox Weather, the system triggered over 120 reports of wind damage across more than half a dozen states. While it did not produce the catastrophic severe weather outbreak initially feared by meteorologists, the regional footprint remains vast.
Beyond the immediate New York and New Jersey borders, nearly 30,000 customers lost power in western Connecticut, while over 40,000 outages were recorded in the greater Philadelphia region affecting PECO, PPL, and Delmarva customers. Farther west, FirstEnergy reported that high winds over the past several days initially knocked out power to over 800,000 customers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland. The utility noted that repairs required the replacement of nearly 600 utility poles and over 225,000 feet of wire. Utility crews are actively taking advantage of daylight to clear debris and restore power networks across the affected states.