Power restoration continues in South Jersey

The number of people in South Jersey without power is slowly shrinking as utility crews in South Jersey continue to work on restoring power following Tuesday afternoon's severe thunderstorms.

PSE&G remains optimistic that 98% of their customers will be restored by Thursday night with the rest on Friday afternoon. As of 5:45 p.m. nearly 8,400 PSE+G customers were still without power according to its outage map. Medford and Cherry Hill continue to have the most customers still out.The utility company has requested that customers who are still without power but receive a restoration message to notify them so a second repair can be made.

The utility brought in 140 linesman crews from its northern and central divisions, as well as contractors from Long Island and Pennsylvania. "The extensive pole tree and utility line damage we experienced with this storm requires intensive manual labor to make repairs," said John R. Latka, PSEG's Senior Vice President of Electric and Gas Operations. PSE+G says that with rain and thunderstorms in the forecast for the weekend they will "keep extra personnel and equipment on standby should additional outages occur.

The utility in a tweet notes that they "restore power to the largest numbers of customers first; also hospitals, police and fire stations."

Atlantic City Electric, with nearly 116,000 customers still in the dark on its outage map, now expects to have "the majority" of its customers restored by Friday night and all customers back by Sunday night. An additional 500 people are doing assessment and support services related to restoration, according to a tweet, plus an addition 419 line personnel.

ACE Media Relations Manager Frank Tedesco  says 20 main transmission lines  in the western end of their service area, each of which serves thousands of customers,were affected by the storm along with 5 sub-stations. He also says their outage number may trend up because some customers will need to be taken offline as repairs are made.

Utility Contact Information:

• Atlantic City Electric – outage map | Facebook | Twitter | 800-833-7476
• PSEG – outage map | Facebook | Twitter | 800-436-7734
• JCP+L – outage map | Facebook | Twitter | 888-544-4877

The American Red Cross has opened 2 reception centers in Gloucester County at the Mt. Royal Firehouse on Mantua Boulevard in Mt. Royal and the Gloucester County Complex on Delsea Drive in Clayton. Both offer access to electricity, food and water. A medical needs center is also open at 264 County House Road in Clarksboro.

PSE&G has made water and power strips available at the Medford fire station located at 1 Firehouse Lane, the Lenola fire house at 229 N. Lenola Road and Cherry Hill West High School. until 8 p.m. Wednesday night and from 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. on Thursday.