Downtown Power Outage Affects 18k Businesses, Five Metro Stations
A Pepco substation serving a good portion of DC’s downtown business district failed at 7:30 this morning, leaving 10,000 businesses in the downtown area without power, and Metrorail stations McPherson Square (Orange/Blue), Farragut West (Orange/Blue), Farragut North (Red) and Dupont Circle (Red) without power. In addition to the outages, there’s been a fire reported by WMATA at Metro Center, and another reported by WAMU, WTOP and multiple twitters at Dupont Circle Station this morning as well.
DC Dept. of Transportation says that more than 30 traffic signals in the downtown core are also out, and has requested that people please treat them as four ways stops. I know there were more than a few people on my drive up 15th street who failed to treat them as such. Of course, when traffic’s flowing, it’s hard to treat them that way, I get it, but still.
Be aware, commuting today probably sucked ass, so please be nicer to your coworkers who looked like they slogged through a marsh of fire in order to come to work.
[Update, 9:56] Dupont Circle Metro is now closed due to the power outage. Apparently a lot of people were having trouble exiting the station on the long escalator climb to the surface.
Note the date – Friday the 13th
Yeah, all the triskaidekaphobics out there are probably cursing the darkness.
I’m certainly not cursing anything ;-) somehow made it through the metro darkness, crossed 14th & K with no lights, to have my office send me home since we can’t get anything done with the power out. I am one happy girl!
Interesting, it’s to note that the White House was also affected (noting the staffers standing on the street earlier). Private data connectivity is also affected (depending on the routing) as we’ve been told that our Bloomberg feed was rerouted around downtown DC. I’m not looking forward to the ride home this evening, I’d even consider calling it a day earlier than expected.