I woke up today to the voice of a hotel employee announcing that the building’s power was out, as was the power for an entire city block. It turns out that the power outage in DC is a bit larger than my hotel employee knew. I hiked it from the hotel for a few blocks trying to find a Starbucks with power, and every building was out. It seems there is also an unrelated outage of Metro service on the Red Line.
In any case, I ended up hopping in a cab and heading south of The Mall where I found a place to get power and get on the internet. The reports are that this outage is thankfully not terrorism related, but the vulnerability of our electrical infrastructure still rings true. A point I made here in The New York Times, almost 5 years ago.
UPDATE: Here is a map I’ve created detailing the area of the outage:
Below are links to stories about the DC power outage, I’ll try and update them throughout the day:
WTOP- Massive Power Outage Hits DC— Some injuries reported from heat exhaustion, people trapped in elevators at AARP, PEPCO Headquarters affected [that bodes well for a quick repair]
Baltimore Sun- Washington DC Hit By Power Outages
MarketWatch- Power Outage, Small Subway Fire Affect Washington DC
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