New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has ordered the Board of Public Utilities to investigate how utility companies in the state handled Wednesday's snow storm. At the height of the storm, more than 350,000 people in New Jersey were without power.
“We are going to examine what went wrong, and whether the plans for protecting and strengthening our grid devised post-Sandy have been followed statewide. We will look to see if all preparedness measures were taken before last Friday, knowing a major event was coming. If they have not been, that is entirely inexcusable," Governor Murphy said in a statement.
As of Friday morning, 78,000 JCP&L customers were without power. PSE&G had 31,000 customers in the dark.
Murphy announced that a series of hearings will be held in areas that are served by JCP&L, which was responsible for most of the outages in the state. In addition to Wednesday's torm, the BPU investigation will also investigate outages after last week's nor'easter.
“The BPU will be conducting an immediate in-depth review of the storm-related Board Orders implemented post-Sandy,” said BPU President Joseph Fiordaliso.
More than 20 inches of snow fell on parts of northern New Jersey during Wednesday's storm. The utility companies have said some customers could be in the dark for days before their power is restored.
BPU will also look at how to improve storm preparedness in the future, in order to avoid significant and long-lasting outages.
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