With much of Montgomery County still without power and ongoing 911 problems continuing across Northern Virginia on Sunday afternoon, local officials vowed to press utilities to restore service more quickly.
“I will not accept the timetable of July the 6th, said Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), shortly after Pepco announced some homes would not have their power restored until Friday or even later. “Having our citizens go seven days without utilities in my opinion is not the kind of service we should expect.”
With recovery from Friday night’s storm stretching into the week ahead, school officials in the District, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties announced that the schools would be closed Monday for summer sessions and other events. And Maryland declared liberal leave for all non-essential state employees. But all federal agencies are set to open Monday, though officials said workers could take unscheduled leave or telework.
District government, however, is expected to be open on Monday, officials said. Dozens of city traffic signals remain without power. But Paul Quander, the District’s deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said traffic control officers will be in place at anticipated trouble spots for the Monday morning commute.
At 7 p.m., about 608,000 Washington-area businesses and households — one in three of the region’s electric customers — remained out of service, according to data furnished on utility websites.
The highest level of outages — just shy of 60 percent — was reported for Pepco service to Montgomery County. There, about 184,000 customers remained in the dark.
Across Prince George’s County, about 84,000 Pepco customers and 35,000 Baltimore Gas and Electric customers remained without power — reflecting 37 percent and 44 percent outage rates, respectively. Across Northern Virginia, Dominion Virginia Power reported that about 27 percent of customers had no power, with about 227,000 total affected. And in the District, Pepco reported nearly 66,000 without power — about one in four.
Dominion officials said most customers would have power by Tuesday, though everyone will not have electricity restored until next weekend. BG&E officials also said it would take most of the week to get all the power up running.
Though the number of people affected by power outages was dropping throughout the day, the anger of public officials was palpable.
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3 Responses
These public official who scream gevalt about service restoration times are the same clowns who scream gevalt when the utility agressively trims trees and oppose rate increases linked to upgrading reliability. The storm that hit D.C. and Baltimore Friday night had 90 mph winds and ripped down huge numbers of trees and power lines. BG&E and PEPCO are literally rebuilding sections of the grid, in some cases 8-10 poles were down within a block or two. Maybe if the officials would shut up and get out of th way or provide crews to clear streets of fallen trees, (which is not the utility’s job) they might get the lines fixed sooner.
A lot of Yidden are affected. Pepco is not working to its full potential to restore service.
To no. 2….PEPCO has imported over 800 crews from out of state (including Quebec and Ontario) to assist in the work and all their crews are working 12 hour shifts. The are legally precluded from hiring any local crews who are not trained on working around power lines. What is “full potential’…And as far as a “lot of yidden being affected”, so are a “lot of goyim”. Your comment is one of the most comments of the day (outdone only by the schlamiel in Baltimore from Shomrim who complained that BG&E was deliberately putting yidden at the end of the line for service restoration since they failed to call the outage hotline over shabbos).