(Updated at 9:15 p.m.) Thousands were without power in and around Crystal City and Pentagon City for much of the day due to a widespread outage.
The outage was first reported just after 11:15 a.m. Arlington County firefighters investigated a possible underground explosion and treated a Dominion worker with burns from steam that came out of a manhole, according to scanner traffic.
“At 11:18 a.m. a splice in an underground cable failed causing an arc/flash and 10,000+ outages in Crystal City, Pentagon City & nearby neighborhoods,” Dominion spokeswoman Peggy Fox told ARLnow shortly before 4 p.m. “We’re working to have all customers restored as quickly as possible, hopefully in a half an hour. A worker was treated at the scene and released.”
ACFD also responded to a large quantity of stuck elevator calls in the area, owing to the outage.
More than 10,250 Dominion customers were without power as a result of the outage. The outage map extended into the Aurora Highlands and Arlington Ridge residential neighborhoods, including Oakridge Elementary.
Arlington’s parks department closed the Long Bridge Aquatic and Fitness Center and the Gunston Community Center due to the outage.
As of 5:15 p.m., Dominion said all but 1,229 customers had their power restored, with outages still reported along Crystal Drive by ARLnow readers. As of 9 p.m. all customers had been restored, per Dominion.
Transformer blew on 15th st pic.twitter.com/TUBEKFx8RW
— Rachid Maalouf (@MaaloufRachid) August 22, 2023
Can confirm, I’ve never seen so many people out on the sidewalk as all homes and businesses have lost power! https://t.co/yFeHtFooAb
— James Gethyn Evans (@jagevans) August 22, 2023
Yup. It's chaos here right now. https://t.co/CBZSZVrBdf
— Alex Matsuo 👻🏳️🌈 (@TheSpookyStuff) August 22, 2023