A power company employee was dispatched to switch over a meter to a new customer in Northern Virginia — as the rest of the neighborhood sat in darkness.
The bizarre incident occurred Monday afternoon, said Jennifer Clark, who lives at 14800 Anderson Court in Dale City. A Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative truck drove by her door — left open to let light in — to restore power.
Or so Clark thought.
Instead, the van was there because a new customer had just moved in, said company spokeswoman Inia Burginger, and the employee did not know about the outages in the area. A damaged circuit had been fixed Saturday, and another outage involving a tree that had fallen on power lines was reported just after midnight Sunday, she said.
The confusion, though, was no comfort to residents, who were left literally in the dark.
Around the same time as the arrival of the service vehicle, a woman who recently had been released from the hospital began having a seizure across the street, Clark said.
“It’s almost like a comedy of errors,” she said. “It just got ridiculous.”
Clark’s home was still dark Tuesday after losing power Friday.
“It’s just getting to the point now where it’s disgusting,” she said. “It’s scary — some of us can’t leave.”
Clark’s story was first reported by WTOP radio, where it was recounted on the air Tuesday morning.
The Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative is trying to allocate “all possible resources” to restoring power, Burginger said. She added, though, that most of the nonprofit company’s customers still had power and that NOVEC needed to serve them as well. The company had about 700 reported outages out of more than 140,000 customers Tuesday afternoon.
NOVEC, a locally owned company headquartered in Manassas, provides electricity to more than 140,000 customers in Fairfax, Fauquier, Loudoun, Prince William, Stafford and Clarke counties, and Manassas Park.
