Wildwood's 3rd significant power outage of the summer hurt businesses once again
WILDWOOD, N.J. (CBS) -- Wildwood has had issues with power all summer.
Over the weekend, the shore town marked its third outage that impacted residents and businesses on the boardwalk.
And while business owners are looking forward to a good close of summer, they do say they want to know why this keeps happening.
"All the years I've been up here we've never had such a... it's almost surreal," Haroula Rotondi, owner of The Hot Spot, said.
Lights were out again in Wildwood on Saturday – another power disruption hitting businesses and beachgoers. At The Hot Spot, Rotondi says it caught them during their dinner rush.
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"We just started loading up for dinner and it went black," she said. "And you just hear that 'Oh, ah.' Everybody's walking up here. It was pretty scary."
Around 3,600 customers lost power Saturday, including Morey's Piers. Crews had to help people off rides that shut down. Leaders at the pier say this latest outage is another blow to their bottom line.
"When you're in a seasonal business you have a very short time to realize the revenue," Denise Beckson, the vice president of Morey's Piers, said. "It's not something where you can say, 'Oh we'll make that up next quarter.' We've got the summer and that's it."
Saturday marked the third significant outage Wildwood has faced during the summer. In July, the island lost power for days because of a fire at a substation. But Atlantic City Electric does not believe this outage is related to that.
"We do know a downed wire is the initial cause, now we're trying to determine what caused the wire to fall," Candice Womer Sr., a communications specialist at AC Electric, said.
Power officials say they understand the pain these outages are causing businesses and vacationers and they're working on both long-and-short-term fixes. They say they'll have crews out this week making sure everything is ready for Labor Day.
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"We have personnel out there now inspecting all of our equipment to make sure there are no repairs that need to be done prior to the big weekend happening," Beckson said. "We want to make sure that we are proactively looking at our systems and making sure they're working the way they should."
AC Electric officials say they are looking into some upgrades to the electric grid as well. That includes some projects they say have already started in some of the shore towns.
Officials say they're also staying in contact with local leaders on how to prevent these outages from continuing.
