Contact: Priscilla Knight, 703-392-1580, pknight@novec.com
As of 3:30 p.m. today, NOVEC reports approximately 1,100 customers remain without electric service due to the heavy wet snowfall that occurred over the weekend. “Our first reports of storm related outages came in the early morning hours of Sunday,” said Operations Assistant Vice President Allen Barbee. “As the storm intensified and the winds picked up, we began to have outages throughout our service area,” he continued.
Heavy, wet snow, combined with significant wind gusts, caused trees to fall across distribution lines. “There were areas on our system where we literally had to cut our way in to reach the problem and make repairs,” Barbee noted. “NOVEC has a very aggressive right-of-way maintenance program, but many of the trees that caused problems were outside of our easements and were otherwise healthy.”
The counties with the highest number of customers affected were Prince William, Stafford and Fairfax. Nearly 12,000 NOVEC customers were affected during the course of the winter storm, with the peak, 6,800 customers, occurring at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning.
“Planning and preparation are key components of our service restoration plan,” explained Barbee. “We monitor weather forecasts very closely and our personnel were on stand-by to enable quick response. Advance arrangements were made with contractors to assist with tree removal and service restoration. We have also had crews from Prince George Electric Cooperative and Central Virginia Electric Cooperative working on our system. Repair personnel have been in the field since the first calls came in and our efforts will not end until service is restored to all of our customers. We continue to make steady progress and will clearly have most customers on today (February 13), though it may be Tuesday until all repairs are made,” he added.
