A heat wave that blanketed Long Island with sweltering conditions over the weekend cause tens of thousands of homes and businesses to lose power, officials said.
PSEG Long Island reported that more than 27,000 of its 1.1 customers lost power in Nassau and Suffolk counties on Saturday and Sunday. Most were restored by Sunday night, with only a few hundred outages remaining Monday morning.
“Crews have been working 16-hour shifts in grueling conditions to ensure any customers affected by an outage have power restored safely and as quickly as possible,” the utility said in a statement, blaming the outages “local, isolated equipment failures.”
The National Weather Service (NWS) lifted the excessive heat warning Sunday night. High humidity made temperatures in the 90s — with a high of 99 recorded in Islip on Sunday — feel like up to 112 in parts of the Island, according to Upton-based NWS meteorologist Tim Morrin.
“The real story this weekend in this heat wave was the heat index,” Morrin said. “It wasn’t even necessarily record breaking in the realm of temperature…but it was certainly impactful when it comes to the dew points that help generate those heat indexes.”
Now that the heat wave has passed, parts of the Island are under a flash flood watch as potentially severe thunderstorms are forecast to hit the region.
