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.
The District government will 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.
As of 5:30 a.m., about 492,000 Washington-area businesses and households remained out of service, according to data furnished on utility Web sites, down from a high of 1.5 million without power in the hours after the storm.
The highest level of outages on Sunday — just shy of 60 percent — was reported for Pepco service to Montgomery County. By Monday morning, Pepco had cut the percentage of households without power to about 42 percent.
Overall in Montgomery County, about 134,312 households and businesses — 38 percent — remained in the dark as of 5:30 a.m. Monday. (While Pepco serves the vast majority of Montgomery County customers, some homes and businesses get electricity from either Baltimore Gas and Electric or Potomac Edison.)
Across Prince George’s County, about 59,400 Pepco customers and 26,300 Baltimore Gas and Electric customers remained without power Monday morning— reflecting 26 percent and 32 percent outage rates, respectively--a significant improvement from overnight. Across Northern Virginia, Dominion Virginia Power reported that the number of customers without power was down to fewer than one in five: 152,789 household and business lacked electricity, about 18 percent of the total served. And in the District, Pepco reported nearly 47,000 without power — also about 18 percent of its customer base.
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.
Even though the number of people affected by power outages was dropping, the anger of public officials was palpable on Sunday.
“Nobody will have their boot further up Pepco’s backside than I will,” said Md. Gov. Martin O’Malley (D).
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