Update from Dominion Power just received: “The company expects to complete repairs in the Charlottesville area and Shenandoah Valley by Saturday night.”
Dominion Virginia Power is now nearing completion of the third largest power restoration effort in its 100 year history. As of 5 p.m., about 3,500 of the company’s 2.4 million customers were without electricity. More than three-fourths were in hard-hit areas of western Virginia, where system infrastructure suffered massive damage during the violent windstorm of Friday, June 29.
More than one million Dominion customers lost service during this storm and another round of severe weather on the evening of Saturday, June 30. Dominion mobilized a workforce of more than 5,600 company personnel and utility crews from 18 states and Canada to work around the clock to restore power.
Dominion expects to have all known outages related to last weekend’s storms repaired in the Northern Virginia and Richmond metro areas by tonight.
In western Virginia, the company has deployed about more than 450 crews with bucket trucks to repair the remaining damage. Crews are often facing extremely difficult conditions, with infrastructure damage that includes broken poles, broken crossarms, and downed wires. Access to damage sites has also been difficult, and some roads required rebuilding before crews could move in to address the damage.
