Dominion Lists Planned Work Locations in Arlington

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by ARLnow.com October 31, 2012 at 10:05 am 5,177 53 Comments

Dominion has released a list of locations where power crews are expected work today in Arlington County.

The company plans to work on downed lines and blown transformers in more than 40 locations around the county.

As of 10:00 a.m., 5,264 Dominion customers are still without power in Arlington. That’s down from more than 18,000 at the storm’s peak. The company says it plans to have all Superstorm Sandy-related outages restored by Thursday night.

Arlington County crews are continuing to clean up debris-covered streets and assess damage. The county expects damages in Arlington from Sandy “will be in the millions of dollars.”

Dominion is planning to work at the following locations today:

10th St & N. Daniel St

14th St west of N Longfellow St

25th St east of Old Dominion Dr

29th St N & Sycamore St

S. 12th St

40th St south of 41st St

Carlyn Springs Rd & South 1st Pl

Columbia Pk & Buchanan St

Hayes St @ 23rd St

Lee Hwy & N Calvert St

Lee Hwy & N. Vermont St

Little Falls Rd & 26th St

10th St & N Edgewood St

North 17th St & North Hartford St

N 19th St & Lexington

N 23 Rd St & N Fillmore St

N 25th St & N 26th Rd

N 5th St east of N Monroe St

N Barton St & 10th St

Yorktown Blvd & N Brandywine St

N Harrison St & 16th St

N Kennsington St & 35th Rd

N 25th Rd & N Kensington St

N Pollard St btwn Wilson Blvd & 6th St

N Quinn St & N 12th St

N Stuart St & N 25th St

N. Edison St & N. 38th St

N. Quincy St. & N. 18th S

N. Stafford St off Lee Hwy

N. West St & Washington Blvd

Patrick Henry Dr & Washington Blvd

N. Oakland St north of Old Domonion Dr

S 11th St & Frederick St

S 16th St & S Ives St

S 24th Rd

S 4th St & Illinois

S 4th St & Jefferson St

S Eads St south of 12th St

S Glebe Rd & S 3rd St

S. Shirlington Rd. south of 25th St

Washington Blvd & N Longfellow St

Westmoreland St & Williamsburg Blvd

Wilson Blvd & N Madison St

Bummer

Looks like the entire side of the house will have to be rebuilt.
- ARLwahoo
  
  But at the same time, they can replace old insulation/windows/brickwork/etc. Sometimes while this type of disaster sucks, other times it’s not a bad thing as long as nothing valuable was damaged. Hopefully the family is okay and are able to get things fixed up soon
SteveP

Barcroft seems to be absent from that list. Another night without power? The school is still closed too…
- Steve
  
  I don’t know how specific they get with their locations – is it too much to think that ColPk & Buchanan covers the 6th St damage too? I would think that getting power back to Barcroft Elementary would be high up the triage list.
  - SteveP
    
    That might be it. Of course, there is other damage in the neighborhood too. For example, on S Abingdon St, right where 4th St S intersects it there is a tree that fell but is supported by the tree that it fell against and is also now leaning. A neighbor called the fire dept. as those trees leaned on the power lines and was sparking/flaming for awhile (5 or 6pm? during the storm). I think it went out on it’s own. The trees will need to be dealt with but I don’t know what kind of power issue they may be causing.
    - Alex
      
      According to Dominion’s outage status site the Barcroft neighborhood of South Arlington (22204) should have power restored between 6pm and 12am today (or tomorrow in the case of 12am).
gnushell

They are removing the tree in the pic above right now. Sleeping in 40 degree temps last night was rough, and I used to do winter backpacking albeit nearly 38 tears ago. Hope we get power since two weeks post layoff I have a job interview.

Hope everyone is hanging in there.
- drax
  
  You are the antithesis of a whiner. Thanks for your post and good luck on the interview.
- Arlingtoon
  
  Good luck on your interview — lots of people will have their fingers crossed.
Kim W

Getting kids ready for school in the dark with temps in the 50s in the house and serving them cold cereal for breakfast was not fun!
- Josh S
  
  I eat cold cereal for breakfast nearly every day. Capn Crunch this week!! (Hey, it was on sale….)
cold

Our house on the Abingdon side of 6th Street S is not on the list of residences without power on Dominion’s interactive map. About to call someone with the county to find out why the power trucks sat idle for several hours last night in our neighborhood, claiming they needed permission to access the power/equipment.Hopefully someone from Dominion will respond here.
- SoArl
  
  Try harassing them on Twitter.
- Alex
  
  The crews I saw on 6th St S were Pike and not Dominion. Maybe that’s why they needed to seek permission.
- firefighters too
  
  yeah, yeah, yeah, firefighters stand around a lot, and police eat a lot of donuts. i bet you’ve been known to drink coffee on the job.
  
  Dominion and its contractors are extremely competent and their workers do hazardous work under difficult conditions. It is so easy to whine, but so utterly pointless when you have no idea what you’re talking about.
- drax
  
  I’m sure they were just screwing around. I’m sure nobody at Dominion was going to ask them what they were doing later and how much progress they had made after a major storm.
cold

did that yesterday. on the phone with Arl. Co to see if they can shed light (ha!) on the situation.
Kim W

Dominion claims we are part of that big yellow dot of 500-1000 people out. She had no answer to me about why trucks sat idle while the workers watched our kids play football in the court.
- GC_Now
  
  Because there is a lot of work that’s being done in the background that you don’t see. Working around down power systems is a complex and dangerous task. They don’t start work without clearance because it may impact other repairs in various states of completion or because it may pose a hazard to workers and residents (that’s YOU). Other complications involve work not finishing on schedule due to complications, manpower shortages if someone gets sick or injured, lack of parts/tools, etc…
  
  Be glad you still have a home and your kids are safe. If it becomes an issue, go to the emergency shelter or check into a hotel.
  - cold
    
    What disturbs me about the guys in the PIKE truck was the fact that they were hanging out, chatting the kids up, running the truck engines into late in the night, not “doing” anything. They did not approach the adults in the neighborhood to let us know what was going on but rather told the kids that there was something in the woods that fed 40,000 homes that was down. I find this to be irresponsible on the contractors part. I understand about safety, difficulty after a storm, needing staff, equipment, etc. I simply don’t think that contractors or Dominion staff chatting with kids, giving misinformation is responsible behavior.
    - Quoth the Raven
      
      Just curious, but why didn’t one of the adults go up and ask them what they were doing?
      - cold
        
        We did. No response.
dk (not DK)

We’ve been w/o power since Monday night. However, our neighbors behind us have power, and we ran an extension cord from our fridge to their outside outlet. Thank you, kind neighbors.

With a gas stove and a working fridge, I am finding the lack of power to be only a mild inconvenience. The worst part was being awakened umpteen times Monday night as various battery-powered items gave up the ghost and started beeping/chirping (both CO monitors, the Verizon fios box) or screaming (sump pump). It is pretty cold–about 55 degrees–but last night I wrapped up in polartec, made some tea, and sat knitting by candlelight and listening to the radio. Quite pleasant, actually! And we all slept like logs bundled up under comforters. This morning I made oatmeal for the kids instead of their usual cold cereal. However, the rest of my family is a sanguine as I, and my teenager is almost homicidal, LOL, so I’m hoping we will be restored sooner rather than later.

So glad not to have a tree on my house or water in my basement. Without power, I had not seen NY/NJ footage until this morning. Shocking stuff. 🙁
- Josh S
  
  In general, I’d much rather have lost power in this storm than in the derecho. Three nights with no air conditioning in 90+ degree weather was Miserable.
Ziv

I think that the peak gust in the Arlington area was 61 mph according to the weather guys. How does a mild wind storm of this sort knock out 18,000 homes power in Arlington alone and 118,000 in Northern Virginia? I realize the soil was sodden which allowed older trees to fall in fairly significant numbers, but 61 mph gusts aren’t that uncommon. It isn’t like we got wind anywhere near the power of the storm to the north east of us.
I really think Dominion should stop pushing back on undergrounding the more exposed sections of their power lines. Even if they undergrounded 1% of the ‘worst offenders’ per year, in a few years these 3 and 4 day outages would be a great deal more rare.
Sadly, I think that they have to get more aggressive with cutting back, or cutting down, trees that threaten main trunk power lines. It simply takes to long to repair the damage and if you have 1,000 homes or more depending on the power…
- Josh S
  
  Perhaps you grew up in Antarctica, but 61mph gusts are quite uncommon around here, especially in the middle of several hours of steady 40+ mph wind. I think you’re probably trolling, but who knows…..
  - Ziv
    
    I grew up in Montana and spent a couple years in Ocean City, MD and they were windier than here, but sustained winds of 40 mph and gusts of 60 mph don’t seem to be out of the ordinary for Arlington. More like the windiest day of the year, but not something that only happens every 10 or 20 years.
    But I am not a weather afficianado, just someone who has lost power for a day or more 3 times in the past 4 years, which is pretty amazing.
    - drax
      
      Also, Arlington has lots of large, mature trees to get knocked over. More than Montana or Ocean City, probably. And maybe those places had more buried power lines.
  - brown before green
    
    Ziv is trolling. The Derecho was an extraordinary event. Hurricane Sandy was an extraordinary event. There is nothing routine about 61 mph wind gusts at ground level.
    
    Better for us to plan to keep trees thinned and pruned, and harden our buildings for the new climate.
    - Tannehill
      
      Asking for more diligent maintenance of trees around the lines and to revisit undergrounding hardly qualifies as trolling in my book. But these storms do seem to bring out the crybaby in a lot of people, so cry troll all you want.
    - outoftowner
      
      I don’t see this as trolling and have wondered the same thing myself. Growing up in the midwest, there were much more serious storm that happened much more frequently. I lived in a heavily wooded suburb and I never had to deal with the power outages that I do having moved to northern va. I have lived in my current house for 14 months and have had the power go out for an extensive period (12+hours) 3 or 4 times. I find that to be excessive.
      - Josh S
        
        Definitely a spike in the power going out in recent months / years, even in comparison to previously in Arlington. It may be puzzling, but it hardly seems as if the most likely answer is the utilities.
    - Ziv
      
      I had to laugh, BBG, when you said I was trolling and then said that we should keep trees ‘thinned and pruned’ which is of course completely different than my suggestion that Dominion should “get more aggressive with cutting back, or cutting down, trees that threaten main trunk power lines”. 😉
      And I think that looking at the most vulnerable parts of the feeder lines and 1% of the most vulnerable should be undergrounded per year.
      That is a classic approach of trolls on ArlNow, apparently.
      Use some common sense, work for slow but sure progress on an issue that affects tens of thousands of Arlingtonians in a negative way. And that is… Trolling.
- drax
  
  61 mph gusts over and over for 12 hours, dude. That’s how.
  - Ziv
    
    Except that isn’t what happened. There was a 5 hour period with gusts over 50 mph but only two gusts in that time were even close to 60 mph. I guess my beef is that my condo has lost electricity for more than a day 3 times in just under 4 years. This seems like it is a bit frequent. The Derecho I can understand, but I was out during a lot of the storm and it was windy but it was not something that should have put out the power for 120,000 people in NoVA.
    Dominion could reduce the frequency of these outages but they choose not to do so.
    
    http://www.intellicast.com/Local/Observation.aspx?location=USVA0023
    - Quoth the Raven
      
      How would Dominion reduce the frequency? Seems to me that they do a pretty good job. This was a pretty big storm, you know. And I don’t understand how you say that there were over 50 mph gusts over a five hour period, but only 2 that were “even close” to 60. Aren’t gusts over 50 (for 5 hours) pretty close to 60?
      - Ziv
        
        Dominion could get more aggressive at trimming back trees, and undergrounding the most exposed portions of the feeder lines that supply whole neighborhoods or substantial portions thereof.
        Losing electricity 3 times in less than 4 years is pretty amazing, and a lot of my friends have had it worse. The odd thing is that power outages were much rarer in the 80’s and 90’s. My fear is that this is simply a reflection of the increasingly mature, or senescent, trees that we take such pride in.
        
        The Derecho is probably a once in a lifetime event. Sandy was just a wet, windy couple of hours here in Arlington, and it knocked out the juice for 120,000 of my neighbors. That makes no sense.
      - Quoth the Raven
        
        Pruning or undergrounding are both great ideas, but check out what happened to Pepco when they tried to prune – they got TONS of complaints about how they were doing it, the trees they chose, etc. I’m not defending them — for all I know they did indeed do a horrible job. But it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation for the company.
        
        And undergrounding is HUGELY expensive, not to mention the complaining that will ensue when the company tells they homeowner, “Hey, I know you just put in these 400 dollar shrubs, but I’m going to dig them up to underground these power lines. Sorry!”
      - Ziv
        
        Raven, I hear you on both points. Dominion has looked at pruning/trimming as a necessary evil and their teams have done a pretty roughshod job on several trees, but they should keep after it and simply tell people that it is a choice between cutting branches near your house or those branches cutting electricity to your house after wind events.
        I agree that undergrounding can be very expensive, which is why I think Dominion should look at a cost benefit analysis in which they find the most vulnerable sections of NoVA that would benefit the most from undergrounding and then continue to underground 1% of the most vulnerable feeder lines per year. It would cost much less than attacking the problem on a larger scale, and they would get the best bang for our buck.
        Undergrounding is expensive, but so is shutting down parts of Arlington for 2 or 3 days at a time.
      - Josh S
        
        I think you lose a lot of credibility by repeatedly referring to Sandy as “just a wet, windy couple of hours.” I, for one, am sort of dumbstruck by the arrogance of your approach here.
        
        Also, it makes little sense to speculate that the county has a greater number of “mature” trees now than it did in the 80s or 90s. How, exactly, would that work?
        
        I think it’s odd that you have to reach for an answer to a question that seems pretty obvious to just about anyone else – the trees fell because of a strong storm and they fell into power lines thus power went out. I really am not sure how you go from that set of facts to blaming the utility for your power outage.
        
        I’d also point out that your experience may vary from others in Arlington. I’m sorry your power has gone out so frequently. Mine also went out in July. It didn’t go out this time. And hasn’t gone out any other time for more than a few hours that I can think of. I’d venture to guess that statistical anomolies may help to explain your experience.
        
        All that being said, I agree that since we seem to be moving into a “new normal” (as the tv people kept telling us these last few days), perhaps a different approach should be taken to managing the distribution of electricity. If that’s your take away message, then I guess we actually agree. But why you muddle it up with denying the intensity or significance of Sandy is just puzzling to me.
      - Ziv
        
        The reason we have so many older trees is that most of Arlington was pasture or farmland before it was subdivided and built up between 1940 and 1960. Many of those trees planted in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s are coming close to the end of their life.
        I was in Crescent Hills a few years ago talking to an old timer who told me that when he bought his house in 1955 there weren’t many trees over 8 feet tall except in a few old wood lots. He was exaggerating, but the amount of trees that were planted between 50 and 70 years ago is pretty impressive. And a lot of the trees were chosen for their fast growth, not for their longevity.
        I think that we are seeing a new normal in Arlington, and Dominion hasn’t responded to it yet. I think they will. Was it Churchill that said America usually did the right thing, after exhausting all the other possibilities. I think Dominion is an American company. 😉
        And regarding electrical generation, I still think high rises should have wind generators on the north side of their roof and solar arrays to the south. If the grid goes down it wouldn’t be enough to power the whole building at once, but if a condo owner is able to turn the juice on for 15 minutes every 2 or 3 hours, it would make a ‘black out’ much more comfortable. And we are going to be seeing more black outs if we do nothing.
    - drax
      
      Okay, a 5-hour period with gusts over 50 mph and two gusts close to 60. Good enough for you? Jeez.
  - Tannehill
    
    It was a 24 hour long derecho, that’s what Arlington’s email said.
gnushell

The man who owns the complex behind us has been aggressive with tree maintenance and lost three trees during the derecho. Our complex has been lax, so I was extremely glad to have not had my place severed by a tree.
- Josh S
  
  Proving it’s a crapshoot.
green fish

Just a question.

When I look at the Dominion interactive outage map, Arlington is lit up like a Christmas tree, while there are fewer outages in the rest of the state, even in coastal area which I would have expected to be hit hard.

Although a lot of progress has been made with restoration, Arlington still has 3.7% of customers without power, while Fairfax with similar kinds of suburbs (and maybe even more trees) has 1.5% still out.

Why does Arlington seem to get hit worst that other areas every time? Is it the age of the infrastructure? More trees? What?
- Paul
  
  70-year-plus-old neighborhoods with above-ground lines and mature trees. That’s the short answer. In Arlington Forest, where I live, the lines were routed through the edge of Lubber Run Park. I’m sure it looked nice for the first buyers in 1939 to have streets unmarred by overhead wires, but the trees have grown up around the lines, and it would be unsightly to cut a 100′-wide swath through the Park.
  - TheShadowKnows
    
    On Wilson, just west of Bon Air’s Madame Chiang Rose Garden Tennis Courts, there are wires stretching across the street which are entwined with tree branches.
- emanon
  
  If you zoomed in, Arlington was not really lit up much. The reason it looks so lit up is because it is a very small, very densely populated area, compared to fairfax, alexandria, and farther out, and the big bubbles represent some quantity of people without. If you zoomed in, the big red and orange bubbles became all small blue dots, rather far apart. Most of the people we know who lost power were in fairfax and haymarket (the latter of which where they have underground lines and no trees to speak of).
Arlingtonian

First world problems.
- Josh S
  
  Your point?
  - Ziv
    
    Third world expectations.
House owner

I own the house in the picture. We are all OK. The best part was we never lost power. Even after the tree went through the house.

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