Albany power outage leaves thousands in the dark

ALBANY, N.Y. (WRGB) - Good Friday wasn’t very good for those living or working on Madison Avenue.

Residents and businesses were left in the dark for close to three hours. And in that short period of time, several local businesses took a big financial hit.

Around 4:30 p.m., Richard Becker’s Madison Avenue apartment went black.

“It came on like ten minutes ago for like a minute and I thought, 'Oh good, it’s over,' and then it went out again," he said.

It turns out he was in good company. National Grid says around 3,200 people were without power around Madison Avenue and Lark Street for three hours. National Grid says most of the power lines there are underground, making it harder to fix.

“When its an underground area like that we have to kind of test each area to narrow down where the fault is," said National Grid spokesman Patrick Stella.

El Loco Mexican restaurant is usually packed on Friday nights but it’s hard to attract customers when it’s pitch black. Fish tacos are an annual special on Good Friday, but now they were a special. Pretty much every customer had to be turned away at the door.

“There’s a lot of fish tacos just sitting around in there waiting for someone to get 'em," sad El Loco owner Patrick Noonan.

Just a few hours in the dark and Noonan says he had to shut the place and says their window to make money on Friday came and went.

“I’m just paying people to stand around," he said.

CBS6 followed up with National Grid to find out what caused the outage but haven’t heard back. But they told us earlier that it likely won’t be weather related.