Lights flicker across NYC as brief power outage affects subways, elevators

NEW YORK (AP) — Lights flickered, a subway line was disrupted and some elevators and escalators briefly stopped running when a small explosion at an electrical facility caused a momentary power outage in New York City.

The brief outage just before midnight Thursday affected most of the city, officials said.

“Essentially people saw a flicker in their lights for about a second a little bit before midnight and then voltage recovered or kind of went back to normal,” Matthew Ketschke, the president of the power utility Con Edison.

Ketschke told reporters early Friday that a piece of equipment at a Brooklyn substation short-circuited. He said a protective system akin to a circuit breaker isolated the failed equipment, leading to a brief voltage dip.

A video posted on X, formerly Twitter, shows smoke from the power plant blast floating above the Manhattan Bridge.

Ketschke said about 10 people had to be rescued from stalled elevators across the city.

The outage halted subway service between Grand Central Terminal and Wall Street, New York City Transit officials said in a statement on X.

Long Island Rail Road officials said in a separate statement that all of Grand Central’s elevators and escalators went out of service as well.

Though inconvenient for scattered transit and elevator passengers, the episode rates as barely a flicker in the history of New York City outages.

Widespread vandalism followed a July 13, 1977 blackout that was confined to the city and its immediate surrounding area.

Twenty-six years later, New Yorkers were among the 50 million people across the Northeast who lost power on Aug. 14, 2003.

Much of the city was dark for days when Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast on Oct. 29, 2012.