Thousands of people in the Washington area had their electricity restored Tuesday, but the process was fraught with miscommunication and exasperation, and the unlucky faced another day trapped in a hot house or even surrounded by downed wires.
In the District, the city gave out boxed meals to help people whose food had spoiled, and Virginia recorded three more heat-related deaths, bringing its hot-weather toll to nine. Maryland has reported four such deaths, and the District one.
Pepco, Dominion Virginia Power and Baltimore Gas and Electric explain why electricity can take so long to restore.
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What’s going on with local weather in the Washington region and why it’s happening.
Even as utilities said they had restored power to large sections of the area in the wake of Friday’s storms, some customers complained that the companies were reporting that service was back in areas that still were dark.
And there remained late-breaking outages in homes that had been with power all along.
At 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Pepco had about 11,800 customers without power in the District, 61,800 in Montgomery County and 11,400 in Prince George’s County.
Baltimore Gas and Electric reported 10,400 without power in Prince George’s and 500 in Montgomery. Dominion Virginia Power said it had 46,200 outages in Northern Virginia.
Some residents said long-standing, hazardous problems, such as downed trees and wires, still were unresolved.
And many spent a fourth day in steamy weather and homes with indoor readings in the upper 80s. Pools and cooling centers were opened around the region, and the District said it planned to resume school programs Thursday.
Tuesday was another toasty day, with highs in the mid-90s and more of the same forecast for Wednesday, the Fourth of July. The National Weather Service predicted readings near 100 for Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
“With three little kids, it’s very hard to explain to them what’s going on,” said Noam Parness, who said his home in Montgomery County’s Kemp Mill neighborhood had been without power since Friday.
He said the temperature inside had been around 88, with the basement a little cooler, at 83.
“Everyone’s going stir crazy,” he said.
Parness was one who said Pepco’s smartphone app erroneously reported that power was back on in his community Monday night.
“I was using my smartphone app to check the status of our outage,” he said, “and around 10:30 when I looked at it, it said, ‘You are not part of any outage group,’ which kind of indicated to me that they thought I was fixed, and we certainly weren’t.”
“They did bring up a small portion of the neighborhood,” he said. “So I think they thought that by bringing that up they brought the whole thing up, but they didn’t bother actually driving around to look.”
Pepco spokesman Clay Anderson said large electric feeders “know” how many people they serve. And when a damaged feeder is repaired, its computer technology “assumes that everyone has been turned on. . . . So while technology believes that all 100 people or all five people are on, someone is not.”
“It is extremely frustrating, and we know our customers are extremely upset,” he said. “That is a glitch that we have found, and we are working to repair that.”
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