Most of the 39,000 customers who lost electricity in a power failure in Washington on Saturday had their service restored after about four hours, officials said.
As of 6:30 p.m., 5,500 customers were still without power, according to Potomac Electric Power Company.
Frank Tedesco, a spokesman for the company, attributed the failure to an issue with electrical equipment at its Florida Avenue substation. Officials did not know the cause of the blackout or whether it was related to the heat. Temperatures were in the low 90s around 2:30 p.m. when the power went out.
The company said most of the customers affected were in the Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights neighborhoods. The White House was unaffected by the power failure.
The city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency urged motorists and pedestrians to exercise caution at intersections with no traffic signals and to treat them as four-way stops.
Social media posts showed city firefighters responding to a building where a person was trapped inside an elevator, and others showed passengers waiting on the platform for the Metro.
Around 2:45 p.m., firefighters began responding to calls about smoking backup generators and automatic fire alarms, said Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman with the DC Fire and EMS Department.
www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/us/dc-power-outage.html
Some people talking about it
DC!
What is happening?
Hearing rumors of a blackout! pic.twitter.com/njGjmipOEZ— Chelsey Christensen (@chelseydc) July 27, 2019
Washington DC power outage may include National Zoo. Pretty big outage. @lookner #blackout pic.twitter.com/LRQEXSDD2E
— Miracle Ninja —OoO— (@MiracleNinja777) July 27, 2019
Weird scattered blackout across parts of NW DC right now. Reveals I have some gaps in knowledge of the power grid. Puzzling which places are on and which are out.
— Dave Stroup (@DaveStroup) July 27, 2019
@PepcoConnect Now would be a good time to monitor your Twitter account and provide updates #DCBlackOut
— Trent Bauserman (@TrentBauserman) July 27, 2019
AC