Thunderstorm knocks out power for thousands

May 30, 2019 Community News
The locations of power outages in the Route 1 area in the immediate wake of the storm. (Screenshot from Dominion Energy website)

Last updated at 9:50 a.m. Friday.

Well over 2,000 homes in the Richmond Highway area lost power Thursday afternoon after a severe thunderstorm rolled through the area, and several hundred remained without power on Friday morning.

The fast-moving storm, which hit shortly before 4 p.m., hit the southeast area of Fairfax County particularly hard, bringing down trees and wires from Huntington to Fort Belvoir. It left behind darkened intersections and closed some smaller roads in the area for hours.

Power went out at Mount Vernon High School, cancelling evening activities there. Police said one of the road closures happened when a tree took down wires on Old Mill Road, which is not far from the school.

By 9:15 p.m. close to 2,000 Dominion customers in the Route 1 area still remained without power. The areas south of Hybla Valley and Franconia Road were the hardest hit, with the southeast section of the corridor near Mount Vernon having the highest number of outages as the evening went on.

As of 6:45 a.m., the Fairfax Police were reporting the following roads and intersections were still closed in the Mount Vernon Police district due downed wires or trees (roads re-opened have been scratched out):

  • Old Mill Rd/Rosemary Lena Way (see map)
  • 4500 block of Neptune Drive (see map)
  • 9000 block of Beatty Drive (see map)
  • Beatty Drive/River Farm Drive (see map)
  • Gibbs Street/Colonial Ave (see map)
  • Neal Drive/Cedardale Drive (see map)
  • Washington Avenue/Mt Zephyr Street (see map)
  • Washington Avenue/Jackson Place (see map)
  • Old Mill Road/Patton Blvd (see map)
  • Paul Spring Pkwy/Alexandria Avenue (see map)

While the majority of the outages were in the southern end of the corridor, the Jefferson Manor neighborhood near the Huntington Metro remained without power as well on Friday morning. The outage there occurred before the storm hit, according to the president of the neighborhood civic association, and crews were first seen showing up early Friday morning.