More than 7,000 customers of Jersey Central Power & Light were without electricity in Ocean County and more than 5,000 customers in Monmouth County on Tuesday afternoon, according to the company.

“The outages experienced today have largely been due to trips on our higher voltage lines that feed the substations,” said Christopher Hoenig, a spokesman for First Energy Corp., the parent company of JCP&L. “Our crews are working around the clock and we have activated the same 16-hour shift rotation we utilize during storms to ensure that we are ready to respond quickly when outages do occur. We recognize how tough it is to be without power, especially during the extreme heat.”

Kids beat the summer heat at the Sprayground inside Dorbrook Park Recreation Area in Colts Neck on Monday June, 23, 2025

The exact cause has not been determined — though in a separate incident, a wire did come down in the Leisure Village area in Lakewood, causing an outage, Hoenig said.

First Energy’s own outage map reported just before 4 p.m. that 7,032 customers out of 257,959 total customers — or 3% of all customers in Ocean County — were without electricity as the temperature surpassed the century mark. In Monmouth County, 5,430 out of 290,388 total customers — or 2% of all customers in Monmouth County — were without power.

There were reports of traffic lights out in Bay Head, according to the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office.

Contact Asbury Park Press reporter Erik Larsen at [email protected].