NEW YORK (AP) – About 8,100 Staten Island homes lost power Wednesday because of a pair of cable failures, a Consolidated Edison spokesman said.

The first wave of the blackout began at around 1:45 p.m. and knocked out electricity to about 4,000 homes in the borough’s West Brighton section.

Work crews were able to restore service to about half those homes, but a second outage left an additional 4,100 customers in the area without power, Con Ed spokesman Joe Petta said.

Officials weren’t initially sure what caused the feeder cables to fail, or whether the two blackouts were related to extra demand for electricity because of hot weather.

Work crews were still trying to restore service to about 6,100 homes at 5 p.m.