Power Outages in North and Central New Jersey

As expected, severe winter weather conditions are taking place in Northwest and Central New Jersey where freezing rain continues to be a problem. More than 10,000 customers are without power in Middlesex County with both PSE&G and Jersey Central Power & Light. Other Central New Jersey counties also have several thousand without electricity. For now, it appears a corridor from Hunterdon County down through Monmouth County has been impacted the most. Hopefully things will begin to be relieved here as Newark and Trenton have popped above freezing for the first time. New Brunswick is still at 32 degrees according to an observation site. Any community north of a line I have drawn on the temperature map is still likely observing freezing rain.

The Ice Storm Warning remains in effect for Central and Northern New Jersey.

The precipitation is starting to end in Southern New Jersey, but we still have two to three more hours of steady rain or freezing rain in North and Central New Jersey. However, a triple point low with a cold front will approach the warmer air across Southeastern New Jersey this afternoon and this coulc cause some scattered gusty thunderstorms.

Otherwise, tonight the winds will increase to 15 to 25 MPH with gusts to 45 MPH. These winds could bring down trees and branches loaded with ice and add to the outage problems. In areas south and east of Philadelphia, a lot of branches still got ooated in some ice and were impacted by last week's wet snow. These broken branches from the last storm may come down from gusty winds. So, we will have to watch the wind gusts tonight.

Jersey Central Power and Light: [New Jersey]
http://www.firstenergycorp.com/outages/outages.do?state_code=NJ

Public Service Electric and Gas: [Western, Central, and Northern New Jersey]
http://www.pseg.com/home/customer_service/outage_info/outagemap.jsp

Atlantic City Electric: [South Jersey]
http://www.atlanticcityelectric.com/home/emergency/maps/stormcenter/default.aspx

Orange and Rockland: [Extreme North Jersey]
http://wp1.coned.com/or_stormcenter/default.aspx