An aberration made a jumbo-sized breaker open at the Con Edison substation between E. Fifth and Sixth Sts. on Avenue A around 9:30 last Tuesday night, causing a thunderous bang and a brief power outage in parts of the East Village.
People nearby thought there had been an explosion at the substation. Lights briefly dimmed on Avenue A, while farther east, some public housing was reportedly without power for a longer period. The outage was long enough that electric clocks and appliances with clocks needed to be reset afterwards.
Joe Petta, a Con Ed spokesperson, said it was not a serious incident, and is known as a “fault.” It may have been caused by any number of factors that interfered with the normal flow of power, from a power surge to an animal in the substation coming in contact with one of the breakers, Petta said.
“These are huge breakers, nothing like you have in your basement,” Petta said. “The lights [on Avenue A] never went out. There was an instantaneous power dip. Other feeders took up the load after this one went out. The noise that people heard — it’s loud, but it’s not an explosion.”
