Dominion Says Power Nearly Restored in NOVA

Dominion Power says that it will have the lights back on in Northern Virginia by tomorrow. However, across the state, it will take by Friday for almost all of its customers affected by Irene to have their power back.

"Nearly all customers in the remaining areas, which suffered the most extreme damage, will have their electric service restored by the end of the day Saturday," according to Dominion Power in a press release sent earlier today.

Those facing prolonged outages are being encouraged by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to take advantage of shelter resources in their area for necessities. VDEM also warned residents who have experience outages for more than 48 hours to throw out any food in the freezer. 

So far, power has been restored to more than half of the 1.2 million customers affected by Irene. More than 6,000 workers and 1,100 bucket trucks have been involved in the effort. Among that 6,000 are 2,000 workers brought in from across the country to help with the effort. 

"The damage caused by Irene was widespread.  Trees and limbs brought down power lines and poles, and storm debris and flooding made it difficult to reach some work areas," said Rodney Blevins vice president of distribution operations for Dominion Virginia Power. "The Irene restoration effort is the company's second largest in its history, behind only Hurricane Isabel from 2003, when 1.8 million customers were affected and restoration took two weeks."

Dominion customers can follow along with the repairs on Twitter. Earlier today, via Twitter, the power company promised to work around the clock until power was restored in all areas.