410 Outages and Counting -The Data Exposing Our Local Power Failures

The following letter was sent to the Berkeley Heights and New Providence Mayors Town and Councils by Resident Michael Leblond. The charts within the body were added by nj21st based on the data provided by Mr. Leblond.

6/17/26

How many outages are too many?  I’ve believed for a long time that Berkeley Heights and New Providence have had far too many power outages since I moved here in 2009.  After a few outages this year, the town was finally able to get a representative from First Energy / Jersey Central Power and Light to attend the June 30th meeting.  

What we need is data, information that shows the frequency of the outages that plague Berkeley Heights and New Providence so First Energy can be held to task about the problem.  I took it upon myself to dig into the volume of outages that our town has faced.  The data spans both towns since our power grids overlap and often the outages impact both towns at the same time, especially around Union Ave, Springfield Ave and Mountain Ave.  Needless to say, the data I have collected is remarkable and even worse than I thought it was.

I combed numerous online sources, from the official government pages, elected officials pages, police and fire pages, library pages, school district pages, Facebook groups across our two towns to collect this data.  I appreciate the forums for their information.  These forums only go back to 2011, leaving events like Hurricane Sandy and related outages off this data.

By my accounting, our towns have experienced more than FOUR HUNDRED outages since 2011.  410 outages over 15 years, (5475 days) averages to one outage every fourteen days, about two per month.  This volume of outages has caused school closures, early dismissals, dozens of responses by police and fire departments and DPW’s, business losses, damage to roads and library closures.  

I have included the data from my search.  Outages are documented with links to each outage on the forums they appear on.  Large scale outages have multiple sources, showing their scope.  Hopefully this data will convince the leaders of our town that this is a crisis that needs to be addressed.  The folks at NJ21st also reviewed and analyzed the data as well.  I have included their documents as well.  

Sincerely,
Michael Leblond

Source Data