MIDDLEBURGH - About fifteen minutes after noon on Sunday, July 5th, amidst the holiday weekend, a grid failure in an area centered on Middleburgh Village caused thousands of customers to lose power. National Grid explained to village officials about the cause of the outage, which was relayed on the Village's Facebook page.
About an hour and a half after the outage, an overhead line crew was en route to begin field ties to restore some customers. A substation crew was dispatched to identify the issue and begin repairs.
About two hours after the outage, it was determined that a fault occurred on the distribution system serving the Middleburgh area, causing the loss of two phases. While the cause was still under investigation, the operations teams remotely isolated the affected section by opening two devices and restored one circuit by rerouting power through another feeder. Additionally, a line crew was promptly dispatched to make additional switching in the field to restore more customers.
Three and a half hours after the outage, power appeared to be coming back online throughout the Village and surrounding area but it remained touch and go. Some customers remained without power.
A little more than four hours after the initial outage, some other problems appear to have arisen that extended the outage. Slightly less than six hours after the initial outage, power was restored to all customers.
During the early morning hours of Tuesday, the grid experienced another failure. Shortly after 5am, power failed in the Village with reports of a blown transformer behind the Middleburgh Diner and numerous downed trees on Cotton Hill Road, leading to multiple power outages.
Power in the Village remained down for a little over seven hours. It took slightly longer to restore power to a portion of Cotton Hill Road.
During the outage, we were able to receive updates directly from National Grid by following their handy Upstate NY Power Outage Map.
The Village of Middleburgh and The Mountain Eagle would both like to extend much thanks to National Grid crews for responding rapidly on a holiday weekend.
