UPPER WEST SIDE, NY – A blackout hit a large portion of Manhattan's West Side on Saturday evening, affecting more than 73,000 customers. Subway service was slowed – if not stopped – in all boroughs at one point and people were trapped in elevators.

From St. Luke's Hospital, which had to switch to backup generators, to Madison Square Garden where a Jennifer Lopez concert was cut short and people evacuated, to Broadway where theaters emptied and impromptu performances broke out on the street, the effects of the outage were felt far and wide. Emergency workers were sent building to building to check on people on lifesaving equipment and to look for people who were trapped.

There were no reports of injuries or fatalities as of midnight. Officials tell Patch that there's no indication that foul play was involved but will still work to make sure that wasn't the case.

"We have to make sure that this never happens again," Governor Cuomo said at a news conference. "I've seen this movie before," he added referring to previous outages and substation fires. The outage struck within three hours of the moment of the 42nd anniversary of the historic 1977 blackout that darkened the entire city. Some neighborhoods did not get power back for 24 hours.



Con Ed Chief Executive Officer John McAvoy said that the power went out at 6:47 p.m. and was centered from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River and from West 42nd Street to West 72nd Street.

"We are in the process of restoration," McAvoy said at a news conference. Moments later, the lights in the area where he was speaking popped back on.

McAvoy said that the cause of the blackout is under investigation but said it was not a question of too high a demand on the system. He did, though, quickly dismiss as "very unlikely" an assertion by Mayor de Blasio that it was caused by a manhole fire. The mayor, who was in Waterloo, Iowa for his presidential campaign, tweeted around 90 minutes after the incident started that the city's Office of Emergency Management was working with other agencies to coordinate the response.