DC Still Dark

Huge chunks of Washington DC and its surrounding counties are going into a fourth day without electricity, with relief for hundreds of thousands not expected until Friday.

Politicians may not have been happy Sunday when power companies told customers that their electricity may not return until the end of the week, but the severity of Friday night’s storm left utility officials opting for candor as work crews began to spread out to neighborhoods. Racing at speeds of more than 60 mph with explosive force, Friday’s line of thunderstorms knocked out power and knocked down large numbers of trees, many of them huge, leaving officials struggling to even complete a damage assessment. Rodney Blevins, vice president of electric distribution operations for Dominion Virginia Power, said the weekend’s storm caused the third-worst outage in company history. It is the only one of its five largest mass outages not caused by a hurricane, he said.

The Washington Post has published the above outage map in which darker areas indicate more widespread outages in the city proper. Montgomery County, Maryland alone presently has several hundred thousand sweltering customers without power, drawing this typically blunt response to the repair timetable from Gov. Martin O'Malley: "Nobody will have their boot further up Pepco’s backside than I will."