From Northern Neck Electric Cooperative:
Many of our crews work their entire 16-hour shift without a warm meal. We know they appreciate this gesture.
Today, crews restored power to about 1,300 members. With the support of contractors and mutual aid personnel, crews were able to complete the necessary repairs to restore over another 1,000 members. Just over 1,000 members are still without power.
Much of this work was extensive and included rebuilding transmission lines, replacing broken poles, removing large trees, and battling the icy, wet, and cold weather. In some cases, lineworkers had to hike through snow more than a quarter-mile to access the poles, and then climb the pole and make the repairs by hand.
During these restoration efforts, a broken transmission pole was discovered near Oak Grove. To make the necessary repairs and prevent a lengthier outage at a later date, there will be a planned outage between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM, tomorrow, January 6. This planned outage will impact the following areas:
Round Hill
Tetotum
Westmoreland Shores
Longfield Road
Maple Grove
We thank our members for their patience as our crews work safely and diligently to restore power.
NNEC has an outage map available for members should outages occur, which is available at https://outages.nnec.coop/
From Dominion
Since 4:00 a.m. Monday, nearly 400,000 customers across our Virginia service area have experienced a power outage. Significant restoration progress has been made with around 330,000 customers restored as of 5:00 p.m. Wednesday.
Wet heavy snow has caused extensive damage. Of the more than 7,000 work locations identified, repairs have been completed at more than 5,600 sites.
Crews across the country have arrived to assist our teams and together we will continue to work diligently on the 1,600 work locations that remain.
We expect most customers will have their lights back on today, but because the damage is so widespread, restoration efforts will likely extend into Thursday.
From Rappahannock Electric Cooperative:
Several hundred mutual aid workers from across the country have now joined REC’s work force to make major repairs and restore service to the roughly 60,000 members who remain without power. Additional support has been requested, and REC expects hundreds more mutual aid workers to arrive between now and the weekend. Some are traveling a great distance, creating challenges and delays for their arrival.
In total, more than 1,000 REC and mutual-aid employees are now working on outage restoration efforts.
Field workers have discovered around 70 broken poles and expect to find significantly more as they are able to reach additional damage sites. They continue to be challenged by snow- and ice-covered roads and downed trees that are blocking the roadways. REC is tracking nearly 1,300 individual outage events.
REC still expects to restore the majority of outages by the end of the weekend, with scattered outages continuing into next week.
