About That Power Grid

New York City managed to avoid major blackouts yesterday (though there were some minor scattered outages), but the same couldn't be said of Saratoga County in upstate New York. Indeed, the power supplier, National Grid, has no idea what is causing the problem sparked by strong storms that crossed the area on Monday night.

Power outages have suddenly ballooned in Saratoga, Warren and Washington counties tonight, hitting more than 58,000 customers.

National Grid officials said they had no idea what was causing the outages but hoped to have more information later this evening. Saratoga County alone had about 26,000 customers without power. Police reports mentioned lines down and burning in the town of Hadley in the Great Sacandaga Lake region.

Earlier in the day, National Grid turned off power to the city of Troy to preserve its long-term ability to provide electrical service to other parts of the sweltering region.

National Grid Spokesman Patrick Stella said that the storm system damaged several substations, transmission lines and poles. As temperatures rose yesterday, additional demands were placed on the already strained system, and parts of it were taken off-line.

"In Troy, specifically, we did intentionally take down some equipment to avoid an overload," said Stella. "We hope to have the majority of the people who are out up by the end of the day today [11:59 p.m. on Tuesday]. But there may be some scattered outages."

"Due to the damage from the storm, the equipment that was not damaged has been taking on additional load while we make repairs, and due to the rising temperature today, some of our equipment that was already stressed by the additional loads from the storm damage were in danger of overloading," he said.

At one point, more than 58,000 were without power across three counties. Due to damage within the power grid, the power had to be cut to limit damage to critical infrastructure.

That's cold comfort to those who didn't have electricity to keep them cool during one of the hottest days of the year.