Hurricane Sandy knocked the region off its grid, leaving millions of people without power — some possibly for up to several weeks, officials said yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn residents won’t have electricity restored for about three days, Con Ed said. They’re served by underground wires.
But another 300,000 Con Ed customers in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx — whose power is delivered by overhead lines demolished by Sandy’s winds — will likely be without power for at least a week and, in some cases, up to several weeks.
In all, more than 22 percent of the Con Ed’s electricity customers in the city are in the dark.
“This is the largest storm-related outage in our history,” said John Miksad, Con Ed senior vice president for electric operations.
Sandy caused three times as much damage as last year’s Tropical Storm Irene, which Con Ed said knocked out power to 203,000 of its customers.
Con Ed and other utilities in the region have issued a nationwide call for assistance.
More than 200 crews from California-based Pacific Electric and Gas are among those now headed here to help.
Parts of Manhattan were cut off the grid by an explosion Monday night in Con Ed’s East 14th Street substation.
Flooding blew out the circuit-breakers in the substation, which feeds electricity to much of lower Manhattan, said Con Ed spokesman Mike Clendenin.
The explosion looked spectacular, but it didn’t affect the parts of lower Manhattan that get their power from substations in Brooklyn, Clendenin said.
Among the other woes faced by Con Ed crews yesterday were 200 downed wires on Staten Island and 180 closed roads in Westchester County, which prevented them from getting to damaged equipment.
Long Island and New Jersey suffered even worse power problems.
Ninety percent of LIPA’s system on Long Island was without power yesterday, and the utility offered no timetable for restoring juice to its 939,000 blacked-out customers.
Gov. Cuomo had stern words for LIPA executives and their handling of power outages in general.
“LIPA has had a very poor track record in restoring power,” he said.
On its Web site last night, LIPA reported that it was dealing with 3,916 outages.
In New Jersey, more then 2.5 million electricity customers — 62 percent of the state — are without power, the US Department of Energy reported.
PSE&G, the Garden State’s biggest utility, said the damage from Sandy is twice as bad as that from Irene.
None of the state’s utilities offered estimates of how long it would take to get power restored.
“This is a really, really difficult blow to the state, but one we will recover from,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.