AND, you probably live in Richmond.
Did everyone have a nice hurricane? We here at RVA Magazine hope that your post-hurricane hangover wasn’t as bad as ours. Because ours was BAD. Now, is your power still out? And is it still out because of hurricane damage, and not because you haven’t squared up with Dominion in three months? Okay.
Prepare yourself for a discrepancy.
VA Dominion Power serves about 800,000 people in the northern virginia area, and as of this afternoon, they have a grand total of twenty-three people who are still without power. They serve a little over half of that- 490,000 customers- in the Richmond area, and of those, 80,000 people are still without power (source). All in all, about eight out of ten people without power in Virginia are in Richmond.
Why? That’s more complicated. Yes, Richmond was harder hit than Northern VA. And customers west of us weren’t hit nearly as hard. But if the severity of the storm is the major factor, why did customers east of us have less outages, and why is their power coming back on quicker?
AND, you probably live in Richmond.
Did everyone have a nice hurricane? We here at RVA Magazine hope that your post-hurricane hangover wasn’t as bad as ours. Because ours was BAD. Now, is your power still out? And is it still out because of hurricane damage, and not because you haven’t squared up with Dominion in three months? Okay.
Prepare yourself for a discrepancy.
VA Dominion Power serves about 800,000 people in the northern virginia area, and as of this afternoon, they have a grand total of twenty-three people who are still without power. They serve a little over half of that- 490,000 customers- in the Richmond area, and of those, 80,000 people are still without power (source). All in all, about eight out of ten people without power in Virginia are in Richmond.
Why? That’s more complicated. Yes, Richmond was harder hit than Northern VA. And customers west of us weren’t hit nearly as hard. But if the severity of the storm is the major factor, why did customers east of us have less outages, and why is their power coming back on quicker?
One contributing factor is certainly the large amount of above-ground power lines around the RVA area. While it’s not impossible for your power to go out if you have buried power lines (the buried lines in your neighborhood can still be fed by above-ground lines), areas with buried lines have a statistically lesser chance of losing power due to a storm, and power will likely come back online quicker because of fewer broken lines. Another factor is population density. One major line down is more likely to affect more people in urban areas than in less densely populated areas, and with more lines to more homes, it takes longer to repair in densely populated urban areas.
The VA State Corporation Commission looked into the cost of burying our power lines after Hurricane Isabel in 2003, and decided that it would be too expensive (about $80 billion, source). My questions are these: how much productivity has been lost due to the power outages? How many dollars in food have rotted away? How many watt-hours has VA Dominion Power not been able to sell due to the outages?
I don’t have the answers, much like Comcast doesn’t have answers for me as to when my fucking internet will work again.
