Electric News Releases

January 31, 2000
11 a.m. EST

Virginia Power Takes Aim at Storm Damage in Richmond Area

RICHMOND, Va. -- With warming temperatures and the arrival of additional repair crews, Virginia Power continued Monday to pour resources into the greater Richmond area to restore service to customers without electricity as a result of the Super Bowl ice storm

As of 11 a.m., about 125,000 of the company's 2 million customers remained without power, mainly in the city of Richmond and the counties of Chesterfield and Henrico.

"After surveying the damage, we are optimistic that we can restore power to more than 60,000 customers by the end of this day," said Tom Hyman, senior vice president-Electric Distribution. "We expect to have the vast majority of customers back on by Tuesday evening with only a few isolated outages rolling over into Wednesday."

The company called in crews from offices in western Virginia, northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to assist with the clean-up effort. In all, the company had a repair force of more than 2,5000 employees in the Richmond area on Monday. That number is expected to grow to nearly 3,000 as more crews arrive Tuesday.

An early morning tour of the hard-hit Richmond area revealed that the bulk of the outages was caused by trees and branches that had come in contact with power lines and not by utility poles and lines that had been downed by the storm.

"This storm was of an entirely different character than the 1998 Christmas Eve ice storm that left miles of wire on the ground and snapped hundreds of poles," Hyman said. "Restoration should go more easily because in many cases we just need to clear lines rather than rebuild them."

The Christmas Eve ice storm coated an area that stretched from Altavista to the Northern Neck and affected about 390,000 customers. The Super Bowl storm affected about 259,000 customers, but was concentrated on the greater Richmond area. About two-thirds of the metropolitan area's customers were affected.

Virginia Power is the principal subsidiary of Dominion Resources Inc. (NYSE: D), an energy company with headquarters in Richmond.

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