Power may be out for a week for some customers
by Matthew Cella and Meredith Somers, washingtontimes.comDecember 13th 2012
Outages numbered in the hundreds of thousands for a second day, as officials warned residents across Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia that power might not be restored until late in the week and crews worked in temperatures nearing triple digits to make repairs from a devastating storm that claimed more than a dozen lives.
During a conference call Sunday afternoon, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell called the storm and the resulting outages a "major, major event."
"The scope and scale of the power outages affecting every region of the state is almost unprecedented," he said.
He also said the situation could deteriorate in coming days, warning of "significant risk of additional storms which could lead to additional outages."
Rodney Blevins, vice president of Dominion Virginia Power, said the outage was the third-largest ever in the state and the only non-hurricane outage in the top five.
He said an additional 55,000 outages were reported overnight. At 2 p.m., Dominion Virginia reported more than a quarter-million outages in the Northern Virginia area, with just more than 400,000 outages statewide.
The power company is bringing in more than 1,000 line workers from 13 states and Quebec to assist in the recovery.
Mr. Blevins said that from a height of 1 million outages, 80 percent to 85 percent of service should be restored by Tuesday night, with 90 percent to 95 percent back by Thursday. Nearly all remaining outages should be restored by Saturday, with the hardest hit areas completed by Sunday.
Officials also confirmed that the death of a seventh person in the state, a Montgomery County rescue worker, was being attributed to the storm.
According to the Associated Press, at least six ofther people were killed in Virginia, including a 90-year-old woman who was asleep in her bed when a tree slammed into her home. Two cousins in New Jersey were killed when a tree fell on their tent while camping. Two were killed in Maryland, one in Ohio, one in Kentucky and one in the District.
Officials in Virginia also said 911 service, which failed Saturday in some areas of Northern Virginia, was fully restored.
In Maryland, Gov. Martin O'Malley toured cooling centers Sunday morning in Montgomery and Prince George's counties.
"There's been an unprecedented number of outages in a very unprecedented sort of storm. We've made some progress, but we still have a lot more work to do."
At 2 p.m., Pepco said 191,000 of its 310,000 Montgomery County customers were without power. Pepco President Tom Graham said the outages could remain until Friday — a timeline Montgomery County Executive Isiah "Ike" Leggett called "unacceptable" during a morning news conference with Mr. O'Malley in Gaithersburg.
In Prince George's County, 87,000 of 226,000 customers were suffering outages, and in the District, 67,477 outages remained among 257,305 customers, the utility company reported.
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In order to handle the demand, Pepco brought in crews from out of state, including Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia and Missouri.
Temperatures in the D.C. area were expected to remain in the high 90s Sunday afternoon, with a possibility for more thunderstorms in the evening. According to the National Weather Service, Monday temperatures are expected to be slightly cooler, with highs in the low 90s.
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