strategic response group is being deployed to this area. this is their augment team, those assets are on the way. we heard this is possibly accidental. reports of a manhole fire. we re not out of the woods yet, as we look at the prolonged nature of this, we re going on now almost two hours, and we re seeing these power outages, the electric grid system is bised on redundancies, the reason it s rare you have a single point of failure. does that kuralt time? power surges, faulty equipment. system overloads and the like, the reason we don t experience them is because you have redundancy. however a prolonged incident means one of two things, either the system has been stressed to the max and the possible damage is so extreme, or authorities
new york city. tha the famous electric billboards in times square, many of them are in the dark. theaters closed their doors. con edison estimates 51,000 customers are without power. the numbers are still climbing as they are working to restore service. the police department is poi pointing to a manhole fire as the cause. and according to the mayor, bill de blasio, no foul play is involved. however, it is worth noting, we re just getting word, the mayor is returning to new york city from the campaign trail. he s currently in iowa. so for now, much of manhattan on a hot saturday night in july is in the dark. let s go live to polo sandoval joining us from the streets where the power is out. polo, fill us in on what s happening there now. reporter: you know, ana, when mayor de blasio returns from the campaign trail, he s going to find some of those 50,000 customers basically in the streets here. important to point out it s already been several hours that
pandemonium. now that the sun has started to go down in new york city, we re receiving the two-hour mark. we believe this took place about 6:45 eastern time here in new york city when a loud boom could be heard. we later found out, it was the rule of a transformer exploding on the west side of manhattan. since then, despite plenty of crews being out there, it has not been fixed. from wnbc, the investigative reporter is joining us on the line. jonathan, what are you hearing from your sources? reporter: we spoke with a senior fire department official and a senior nypd official a short time ago. and there were two locations in manhattan that are causing this disruption. the first on 49th street. there is a manhole disruption that then spread. and there was a second incident at 64th street.
part of the city, around times square, around central park. it s all results, we re told, of a manhole fire. we re staying on top of this story but also need to check on tropical storm barry. barry roared ashore from the gulf of mexico into louisiana as a category 1 hurricane earlier today before weakening, but the worst may still be yet to come. forecasters are telling people along the entire gulf coast that flood waters are coming and rain could be dumping and those floodwaters could remain high. well into next week. let s get right to meteorologist chad myers in the cnn weather center. chad, what more can you tell us? this is a real head scratcher here, ana. this storm has stayed offshore, almost all day, even though the eye or the center is now onshore. the heaviest rainfall has remained off, except for one band that moved over new orleans about an hour ago, even some tornado warnings to the east of new orleans about an hour ago or
your numbers are right, at this moment, the information we have is about 40,000 customers affected. all of our first responders have been deployed now, folks who are in elevators will be responded to by our vice president, our police department. so this situation is being addressed very rapidly, a lot of personnel being sent to the west side of manhattan to address it. what appears to be, anna, is a specific transmission problem and that means hopefully it can be resolved in a relatively quick time. you tweeted out there was a manhole fire, is that believed to be the cause? we re still getting more information. and this is very early on in the situation, anna, we re waiting to get all the facts, what i m trying to make clear is, it s something within the normal electrical grid that didn t work. no other kind of external influence here, this appears to be something that went wrong in