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NEW YORK, NY June 28, 2007 —Con Edison is still investigating the cause of yesterday's outage that could have been triggered by a thunderstorm. About 380,000 people were affected on the Upper East Side and the West Bronx between 3:42 and 4:30 pm. As WNYC's Beth Fertig reports, the power company says the outage was not heat-related.

It was hot. But not hot enough to cause the excess demand that can lead to a blackout, according to Con Edison. Instead, the power company says a disruption occurred in the Astoria substation - which sends high voltage transmission to 2 other substations in the Bronx and Yorkville Manhattan. Chief Executive Kevin Burke says the event could have been caused by lightning reported around Astoria.

He also insists the event had nothing to do with last year's outage in Queens, which brought down the distribution network. This time, the transmission system was affected and workers were able to restore the power within 48 minutes.

Burke added that more customers could have been hit if Con Edison hadn't spent $1.4 billion improving the system after last year's blackout. For WNYC, I'm Beth Fertig.