FIRST NYC, THEN DC..MORE POWER OUTAGES ARE LOOMING: COULD YOUR AREA BE NEXT?(Source Zero Hedge) Last week, New York City suffered a blackout in the heat of summer. Con Edison said the blackout that plunged parts of Manhattan into darkness was due to a substation’s relay protection system that “did not operate as designed.”

The utility company said the faulty system was at its West 65th Street substation.

“That system detects electrical faults and directs circuit breakers to isolate and de-energize those faults. The relay protection system is designed with redundancies to provide high levels of reliability,” Con Edison said in a statement on Monday. “In this case, primary and backup relay systems did not isolate a faulted 13,000-volt distribution cable at West 64th Street and West End Avenue.” THOUSANDS WERE WITHOUT POWER IN WASHINGTON DC A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO.

PEPCO, DC’s electric company, is trying to determine the cause of a power outage in Northeastern DC that left thousands in the dark on Monday.

According to a company spokesperson, this outage, too, was an equipment failure. Chicago is also anticipating hot weather and potential electrical failure. Officials from ComEd in Chicago are also preparing for extreme temperatures – Friday is forecast to be the hottest, with a high of 96 degrees, according to the Weather Channel.

When you have extreme weather of any kind, it can put stress on any system and can cause outages,” said Terence Donnelly, the company’s president and chief operating officer. “We’re watching the pending hot weather moving into our system very closely, we have scheduled our emergency response center to open up and we have scheduled extra crews scheduled to work extra hours.”