Sympathies to our Cousins in Columbia Heights – Another Power Outage

Photo by PoPville flickr user nevermindtheend

Power outages continue to plague parts of Columbia Heights at the most inopportune times. Last night on twitter lots of Columbia Heights residents tweeted us news of another power outage. @cafedarkness at Lamont and 11th St, NW first let us know around 7:15pm. In addition to parts of 11th Street @nnaroosa later tweeted:

“recent outages along 13th street as well with no restoration estimate #hotmess”

The frustration was echoed on the Columbia Heights listserv this morning:

“Last summer you along with other Pepco executives came to our neighborhood in Columbia Heights DC to discuss the Pepco work done to increase capacity of underground feeders from 4kV to 13–

Our neighborhood sat on the sidelines of messy, loud, and intrusive work for months.

Roads were blocked, cars ticketed and towed without notice — all in the name of the Harvard Conversion project to provide increased capacity.

Since Pepco completed their work last summer we experienced a series of brownouts and a number of blackouts.

This didn’t happen before Pepco did work in our neighborhood.

Fast forward to this evening 6/18 a hot day and night — and our power has been out since 11pm– it’s now 6 am. The longest outage to date (and still not fixed)

Could you pls explain what is being done to provide a reliable power supply to the CH neighborhood?”

Pepco’s response at 8:45am:

“We have identified the cause of the outage. It is due to a failed transformer and the new transformer is enroute to be set. I will update you on the Estimated Time of Restoration.

I do understand the impact and will be looking into this further.”