What happens when your power goes out during a heat wave? A Montgomery County, Maryland, neighborhood is learning the hard way as they approach nearly a full day without power.
When severe thunderstorms rolled through the D.C. region Friday night, Robert Bernstein was visiting his dad at an assisted living facility. When he arrived back at his home in Colesville, he found that his electricity had been knocked out.
The power outage comes amid a three-day heat wave that has been hanging over the District and its surrounding areas. It’s a dangerous time to be without air conditioning as officials advise residents to stay indoors.
“It was surely a truly inopportune time for the power to go out,” Bernstein said.
On Friday night, Bernstein was unable to heat up his dinner or sleep comfortably. But his biggest concern was going into Saturday without power with the heat index expected to rise over 100 degrees.
A spokesperson for PEPCO told WTOP that crews are working to restore power in the affected neighborhoods. But Berstein said he’s still “apprehensive,” as his estimated time of restoration continues to be delayed.
He said he lives on an “isolated stretch” of his street where nobody has power, but if you go down the block, the lights are on.
“You do kind of feel like you might be kind of forgotten because you might be better off if there were massive outages,” Bernstein said.
Meteorologists are predicting more severe thunderstorms into Saturday evening, which could mean it’s too dangerous for restoration crews to come out to affected neighborhoods.
As of 2 p.m. Saturday, more than 1,600 households were out of power.
Bernstein was still out of power Saturday afternoon and said the estimated restoration time keeps moving back every hour when WTOP last checked in with him.
“Status of ‘crew assigned’ hasn’t changed in more than 12 hours,” he told WTOP at around 2:15 p.m. Saturday.
