Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) After winds of 25 to 35 miles per hour with gusts up to 60 miles per hour last night and continued wind gusts Monday morning, lots of people in the D.C. metro area are without power.
As of 3 p.m. Pepco had about 2,000 customers without power, BGE 550, and Dominion Virginia had 4,000.
The bulk of Dominion Virginia’s outages are in Fairfax and Arlington Counties, and Pepco has the most outages in the District. Spokespeople from both utilities expect everyone’s power to be restored by Monday evening.
Dominion spokesman Chuck Penn said it’s easy to take tree limbs off of power lines, but it takes hours to repair broken poles, especially when the top wooden section of the pole that holds the wires is damaged. He said first any debris, including trees, need to be removed from poles before new ones can be put up and new power lines can be strung.
“It’s a rather labor intensive and lengthy repair,” Penn said.
Pepco spokesman Marcus Beal said thousands of customers were without power because of a substation issue. Three feeders, which Beal said are basically power lines that are coming out of the substation, were damaged. The problem was mostly resolved around 10:30 Monday morning.
As always, Penn and Beal warn people to stay away from any downed power lines in case they are live.
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