Dominion Virginia Power Focuses Restoration
Effort
on Public Health, Safety Facilities
RICHMOND, Va. - Dominion Virginia Power focused its Hurricane
Isabel restoration efforts Friday on water pumping stations and other public
health and safety facilities shut down by the worst storm in the company’s
100-year history.
Isabel knocked out the power to more than 100 municipal water
pumping stations across the company’s service area. About 20 of the pumping
stations identified as critical by municipal authorities had been restored by
Friday evening, and another 10 were expected to be back in service overnight.
Dominion crews will continue to focus on these important public facilities until
all are back in service.
As of 7:30 p.m., Dominion line crews, contractors and line
crews from other utilities had restored power to about 400,000 customers, with
about 1.4 million customers remaining without power.
While Dominion had assembled a workforce of 7,000 in preparation
for Isabel, initial damage assessments sent the call out for more crews from
other utilities. Companies from as far as away as Oklahoma and Tennessee answered
the call and put their trucks on the road. More than 150 linemen from Florida
arrived in Richmond Friday night.
Dominion is urging its customers to notify the company about
downed power lines by calling, toll free, 1-888-667-3000. Many felled trees
are tangled in power lines and customers should not attempt to clear such trees.
Downed power lines are extremely dangerous.
Dominion also urges its customers to use generators safely.
Unless installed professionally, they should not be connected to the whole house
electrical service. Improperly installed, the electricity could backfeed onto
Dominion’s power lines and injure line crews. Please make sure you use
portable generators properly.
Dominion is one of the nation's largest producers of energy,
with a diversified and integrated energy portfolio that includes 24,000 megawatts
of generation and 6.3 trillion cubic feet equivalent of proved natural gas reserves.
Dominion also serves 5 million retail energy customers in nine states. For more
information about Dominion, visit the company's Web site at www.dom.com.
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Editors and Reporters: Dynamic outage information is available
on-line. To determine the number of power outages in your media market, visit
www.dom.com,
see the Hurricane Isabel logo and click on “Outage
Map” or “Outage
Summary.” This information is refreshed automatically every 15 minutes.
