Dominion Virginia Power Makes Significant Progress, Restores 70 Percent of Customers Impacted by Hurricane Matthew

RICHMOND, Va., Oct. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Dominion Virginia Power crews made steady progress over the weekend, restoring power to more than 70 percent of the 462,000 customers impacted by Hurricane Matthew since 4 p.m. Saturday. As of 6 a.m. Monday, 136,600 customers remain without power at 3,600 work locations.

The majority of those impacted are in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, where historic rainfall, high winds and saturated ground combined to cause extensive damage to roads, bridges and electrical infrastructure. Damage included broken poles, cross arms and downed wire in many locations. Extremely hazardous flooding conditions and high winds over the weekend made it too dangerous to use bucket trucks and hampered our ability to initially make repairs at hard-hit locations.

Since the storm impacts lasted well into yesterday, today is our first full day of restoration. Our crews are out in force and will continue to focus on damage assessments and restoration to critical services such as 911 centers, water pumping stations and hospitals. There were 433 critical services affected by the storm and, as of this morning, 87 percent of them had been restored.

We appreciate the patience of all of our customers as we work through this multi-day restoration effort. By mid-day today, we will have a projection of when storm restoration work will be complete for all customers. Once we have a more complete assessment of all damage, we will be able to provide individual estimated restoration times for customers.   

The company has more than 2,300 people working to restore power and that number will increase as we bring back 500 additional line workers onto our system from contractors returning from Florida. We also continue to work through our mutual assistance process with neighboring utilities.

We expect to have the vast majority of customers impacted in Richmond, Midlothian and Northern Neck areas back on today, and a remaining few by mid-day Tuesday. With the extensive damage in our Eastern Region, we expect restoration work there to take several days.

We cannot emphasize enough to stay away from downed wires and trees making contact with wires. Stay at least 30 feet away and report downed wires to 1.866.366.4357. Call Dominion right away at 1-866-DOM-HELP (1-866-366-4357) to speak with an agent to report the downed wire. Please be patient if the wait time is longer than usual – it is very important for Dominion to know a wire is down.

Be sure to report your outage right away to help us with an efficient restoration. The quickest and easiest way is to report it on dom.com using your mobile device. You can also call us at 866-DOM-HELP.

Dominion Virginia Power is a subsidiary of Dominion (NYSE: D), one of the nation's largest producers and transporters of energy. Dominion serves more than 6 million utility and retail energy customers. It has a portfolio of approximately 25,700 megawatts of generation, 14,400 miles of natural gas transmission, gathering and storage pipeline, and 6,500 miles of electric transmission lines. Dominion also operates one of the nation's largest natural gas storage systems with 1 trillion cubic feet of storage capacity. For more information about Dominion, visit the company's website at www.dom.com

For photos of storm damage, visit https://www.dom.com/hurricane-matthew-photos.

SOURCE Dominion Virginia Power

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