(8:00 p.m. – July 5, 2025)

The National Weather Service has confirmed that on July 3, Union County, New Jersey, experienced straight-line winds and downbursts with wind speeds estimated to range from 65 to 80 mph (source). While the storm was not a hurricane, these are hurricane-strength winds.

PSE&G has been working 24/7 since the storm hit to restore power to impacted customers, and we brought in mutual aid from other utilities. Towns across Union, Middlesex and Somerset Counties were impacted specifically the towns of Fanwood, Scotch Plains, Dunellen, but most of all Plainfield.

So far, PSE&G has repaired or replaced over 100 utility power poles. We have replaced over 40 transformers and over 41,000 feet of wire. These quantities will increase as we continue our restoration and repair efforts.

As of 8:00 p.m., we have restored approximately 80,000 customers and there are fewer than 5,000 customers out in PSE&G’s service territory.  We anticipate restoring another 3,500 through the night tonight.

Why are some power restoration jobs taking two or three days? The July 3 weather brought down many old and incredibly large trees in Plainfield. On July 4 and July 5, when our crews arrived to complete a job, in many cases they often found extensive damage due to the severe nature of the tree and weather damage caused by the storm.

This substantial damage had multiple and cascading impacts: Upon arrival, the crews often found that damage was more extensive than usual due to the straight-line winds and large toppling trees, requiring more crews and more time to complete each job. Specifically, more poles were impacted, more trees were tangled in wires and more electrical equipment was damaged. As jobs took longer to complete this resulted in a cascading of longer completion times as crews could not advance to the next job.

Customers may not see our crews on their street as we might be a few blocks away fixing a large piece of equipment or an overhead powerline that may bring power to their area.

PSE&G called for extra crews, including a large contingent of mutual aid crews from other utilities from other states and we are thankful for all of those resources who gave up their holiday weekend to help restore our customers.

What’s left in Plainfield and the area? The restoration of roughly 1,500 customers is anticipated to go into Sunday, July 5 throughout the day. We continue to work around the clock. For many of these remaining jobs, it is taking just as much work and time to restore smaller pockets (i.e. 5-10 customers) as it does to restore much larger areas (i.e. 400-500 customers).

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About PSE&G
Public Service Electric & Gas Co. is New Jersey’s oldest and largest gas and electric delivery public utility, as well as one of the nation’s largest utilities. PSE&G has won the ReliabilityOne® Award for superior electric system reliability in the Mid-Atlantic region for 23 consecutive years. For the third consecutive year, PSE&G is the recipient of the ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year award in the Energy Efficiency Program Delivery category. In addition, in 2024 J.D. Power named PSE&G number one in customer satisfaction with residential electric service and gas service in the east among large utilities. PSE&G is a subsidiary of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., (PSEG) (NYSE:PEG), a predominantly regulated infrastructure company focused on a clean energy future and has been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for North America for 17 consecutive years (www.pseg.com).