New Bedford Power Outage Baffles Residents

NEW BEDFORD — A mysterious power outage that hit New Bedford early Monday morning has seen thousands of residents in the city's South End and other areas lose electricity — and Eversource has attributed the outages to two separate equipment issues.

At around 1 a.m. Monday, more than 5,000 New Bedford homes were reportedly without power, according to reports and screenshots of outage maps from city residents.

The outages continued later into the morning, with over 2,000 houses and buildings shown to have no electricity just after 9 a.m.

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Karenna Abdelnour said that her mother-in-law in the South End lost power for most of the night and again this morning, only getting electricity back on at around 9 a.m. Monday.

She said the company told her family member that the outage was due to a problem with a transformer.

An Eversource spokesperson stated that the outage was "caused by an equipment issue," noting that company crews arrived in New Bedford just after 7 a.m. and restored power to all 2,400 Eversource customers experiencing problems by 9:30 a.m.

The spokesperson added that the outage affecting over 5,000 residents earlier this morning was a separate equipment issue.

Unlike with storms downing trees, heavy snowfall, or other weather conditions, the cause of this morning's incident was not immediately apparent to city residents.

"I was quite surprised to come home from work to complete darkness," said Peggy Marcial, who noted she lives on Allen Street near St. Luke's Hospital.

Marcial said she lost power from around midnight until 2:30 a.m. Monday and reported it to Eversource.

"I'm not sure what it was," she said. "I drove around my neighborhood looking for the cause but I saw nothing from Grape Street to Hawthorne Street and all the side streets from Rockdale down to Page."

She added that all the houses in the neighborhood were dark except for those with generators.