SANDWICH, Mass. (AP) -- About 300,000 customers lost electric service Monday night in blackouts that knocked out power on Cape Cod and affected wide areas of southeastern Massachusetts.
The combination of a fire at a power plant here and an out-of-service transmission line between Walpole and Carver may have caused the outages, officials said.
The blackouts, which began about 6:15 p.m., affected both residential and commercial customers. Lights also were out on both the Bourne and Sagamore bridges, the only two passenger bridges across the Cape Cod Canal. Power was restored about 90 minutes later.
Officials were looking into a fire at the Canal Electric Plant in Sandwich, which is owned by the Atlanta-based Mirant Corp.
``It's not clear at this point whether something triggered the plant to go offline and caused the fire,'' or if the fire caused the plant to go offline, said Mirant spokesman David Payne.
Disruption of the transmission line, owned by NStar and National Grid, was being blamed on a separate fire in Walpole. National Grid spokeswoman Amy Atwood said the line was taken out of service at 12:45 p.m. and restored around 8 p.m.
She would not comment on whether the transmission line glitch had anything to do with the blackout, but she noted that outages on the Cape did not occur until the fire at Mirant's power plant.
ISO New England, which operates the regional power grid of more than 8,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, is also investigating, spokeswoman Ellen Foley said.
