Community Corner

Pepco Says it Could be Thursday Before All Power Restored

Some College Park residents seeing progress.

Shaoleng Chao sat in a lawn chair across from his home on Duke Street, binoculars to his eyes, watching a crew remove a tree leaning on his roof Monday afternoon.

His power was out for several hours following the weekend tropical storm, but it returned around 8 p.m. Sunday.

Mary Hemelt, who had a large tree topple in her front yard, took a plastic grocery bag of bottled water out to the Mississippi Power employees outside her house, who had been enlisted by Pepco to help with power restoration.

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Her power also returned 8 p.m. Sunday.

Pepco did a good job this time," Hemelt said. "They always do a good job."

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Not everyone in the area is so lucky, however, and for those people it could be Thursday before they have power again.

The Pepco website showed there are still 1,730 customers in the College Park, Greenbelt and Riverdale Park area reporting power outages at almost 5 p.m. Monday. There were still 23,835 homes and businesses in the county, and 52,337 total customers reporting outages.

Earlier today, Pepco reported that it restored power to 140,000 customers so far in Prince George's and Montgomery counties and the district.

A handful of them were on Drake Place Monday afternoon, where a crew of Mississippi Power workers had just finished replacing a utility pole and a transformer, and putting a power line back up. The operation restored power for at least 10 homes, employees said.

There were at least two homes on the street that were too damaged to have power restored at that point, crew members John King and Tommy Jackson said.

Mississippi Power was recruited by Pepco leading up to the storm to help restore power to the Washington area.

Monday afternoon, King and Jackson said they were waiting for two things:

First, a call from Pepco, to let them know where to go next.

And they were waiting to know when they could travel the 890 miles back home.

"Just whenever Pepco releases us," they said.


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