Brief Blackout Leaves Town in Darkness Thursday

Lights throughout Portsmouth went out Thursday evening for about 15 minutes, according to witnesses.

The entire town, as well as National Grid customers in Middletown and Newport, were engulfed in darkness momentarily on Thursday evening. From Island Park to The Glen, street lights, residential homes and busy restaurants, such as Fieldstones, remained in darkness for about 15 minutes, according to an employee of the restaurant on East Main Road. Power was restored to customers just before 7:40 p.m. Customers were only affected for "a minute" before electricity was turned back on, according to National Grid spokesperson Jackie Barry. It is unknown at this time how many customers were affected by the outage. The outage was likely caused by a breaker on Dexter Street, according to National Grid. "We had a problem in our substation on Dexter …

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