Electric News Releases - 1999

September 17, 1999

Virginia Power Launches Major Assault On Storm Damage

RICHMOND, Va. – Virginia Power crews are working feverishly to restore power to the 243,000 customers still without power as a result of Hurricane Floyd.

Those numbers are concentrated in a swath that runs from the Richmond/Petersburg area to Hampton Roads. As of 10 a.m., the Richmond area had 74,000 outages. Petersburg had 20,000. Virginia Beach had 9,000. Williamsburg and Hampton had about 42,000.

"We have a lot of hard work ahead of us," said Tom Hyman, vice president and general manager-Distribution. "We plan to take full advantage of this good weather and work 24 hours a day until all power is restored."

Virginia Power has committed a workforce of more than 5,600 for the repair effort with nearly 3,000 of those in the field . Those numbers include more than 600 contract workers and repair crews from other utilities. Contractors and utility crews from as far away as Ohio and Kentucky have been called in to assist the restoration effort. This is the largest response team Virginia Power has ever assembled.

The company expects that it will still be several days before power is restored to all customers because of the extent of the damage.

"Hurricane Floyd may have lost some of his punch by the time he hit Virginia, but he still packed a wallop," Hyman said. "This was one of the worst flooding events we have ever seen, and it caused major damages."

The company has reopened five substations in Hampton that had been shutdown Thursday due because of flooding.

It also has repaired two transmission lines serving North Carolina's Outer Banks. The loss of those lines Thursday, cut off power to all of the barriers islands nearly 30,000 customers. The popular vacation destination still has about 1,000 customers with out power for various reasons.

Transmission lines in northeastern North Carolina were especially hard hit. Seven transmission lines were out of service Friday, but the company was able to reroute power on two of those. The company is considering flying crews into work sites by helicopter because flooding has made many roads and terrain impassable.

Virginia Power is the principal subsidiary of Dominion Resources Inc. (NYSE: D), an energy company with headquarters in Richmond.

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