Thousands of homes and businesses in New Jersey’s Sussex County were left without power on Tuesday afternoon after a high voltage power line fell across Route 80 in Morris County. 

Jefferson in Morris County and Sparta in Sussex County were worst hit by the outages. While 62,600 customers were without power in Sussex County, nearly 7,100 people had lost power in Sparta.

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It remained unclear what caused the power lines to come down. 

JCP&L spokesman Chris Hoenig told New Jersey 101.5 that the number of customers without power had reduced to around 55,000 as of 5 pm. 

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“We are currently inspecting the substations affected by that line. If those inspections come back clean and there’s no damage and everything is safe to begin restoration we should be able to begin restoration within a couple hours,” Hoening said.

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A NJ State Fair representative told Advertiser News, “The Fairgrounds is experiencing a power outage along with the surrounding areas affected by an incident that occurred out of county. We’re communicating with JCP&L regarding restoration and emergency management for re-establishing water supply. Until this is resolved, there will be no admission into the grounds.”

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Sussex Rural Electric said, “We are gathering information on the outage that is affecting our system at the moment. Transmission lines beyond our system are down and we know very little at the moment. We will post information as it becomes available. This is a far-reaching outage affecting many towns, not just our service territory. Please be patient.”

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The power outage came as temperatures soared into the 90’s amid heatwave in the state.