Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Pepco Failometer Index: 11,000;
Nation's Capital Electricity Supplier Fails in the Rain

The collapsing electrical system of Baghdad Washington, DC and its suburbs was reported to have over 10,000 customers without power tonight . . . in a rainstorm. Apparently the forecast of an ice storm, which has failed to materialize, was enough to knock the equivalent of a moderate size town off the grid. According to tbd.com:
More than 11,000 customers are out of power in Maryland and D.C. tonight, with the bulk of power outages in Montgomery County.

Pepco is reporting that 9,513 customers in Montgomery County are in the dark tonight.

And 1,802 customers are out of power in D.C.

This comes as Pepco announced Tuesday that it was sending hundreds of Pepco workers into the field to prevent power outages.

Customers and elected officials have been critical of the power company since Wednesday, when a snow storm hit the region and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of customers in the area.

Some Pepco customers didn't have their power restored until Monday night.
The WaPo reports nearly all were restored after 2 hours, so that's OK. Who really needs electricity 24 hours a day?

In the next installment: excerpts from emails to the Montgomery County Council.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
Great blog. Do you have an estimate for the liquid precip as a result of last week's snowstorm? at DCA?

CapitalClimate said...

Thanks for your comment. Here are the liquid vs. frozen precipitation amounts for Jan. 26:
DCA (National)...1.52" 5.0"
IAD (Dulles).......1.31" 7.3"
BWI (Baltimore)..1.82" 7.6"
Those were all record liquid amounts for the date.

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