Storm Knocks Out Power to Several Thousand

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We had a terrible storm blow through the area on Sunday afternoon.  Our lights started flickering in our house about 15 minutes before the rain actually hit us.  We were fortunate.  With the exception of the lights shutting off for a brief moment, we never lost power.  Our only inconvenience was having to deal with a computer shutting down and having to reset a few clocks.

Others in the DC area were not so lucky. Immediately after the storm, there were well over 300,000 Pepco customers that lost power, primarily in DC and Montgomery County.  As of last night, Pepco still had over 200,000 customers without electricity.  They are estimating that most of the power will not be restored until the end of the week.  Needless to say, the natives are a bit restless at this news.

I understand the frustration of not having power for several days.  Back in 2003, Hurricane Isabel came rolling up the east coast.  I remember watching the radar maps to see the path of the storm because I was concerned about our basement flooding again.  It looked like the storm was going to be a bit west of us, and it was fairly quiet in my neighborhood.  It looked like we were going to miss the worst of the storm when all of a sudden our power went out.

It was about 3 or 4 days before the power came back on.  I pretty much took it in stride, as expected it to be bad.  The toughest part was trying to explain to my autistic son, who was 9 at the time, why he couldn't play his video games or watch television.  We were fortunate to be able to go take showers or watch a little television at my brother in law's place since he had power.  I took my son bowling with my nephew and brother in law, and decided to call home.  You never saw anybody so happy when the answering machine picked up because it meant the power was back on.

So, I am sympathetic to the frustrations of those without power.  Fortunately for us, we lost our power in September as opposed to the heat of July.  The interesting thing is that Pepco has been hit by a lot more outages from this storm than all the other electricity providers.  The same thing happened during our blizzards last winter.  It makes you wonder if there is something in their infrastructure that makes them more susceptible to outages.  Fortunately, I get my electricity from BG&E.

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