The power went out on the busiest day of the year in Del Ray on Saturday (October 2).
An estimated 50,000 people descended on Mount Vernon Avenue for the 26th annual Art On The Avenue festival that day, but many restaurants and other businesses were forced to shut down due to the outage.
Homegrown Restaurant Group’s Pork Barrel BBQ Restaurant, The Sushi Bar, and Holy Cow Del Ray lost a combined $30,000 in sales, co-owner Bill Blackburn told ALXnow.
“It was disappointing,” Blackburn said. “It was a lot of work for nothing.”
Dominion Energy reported that the outage was due to underground switch and cable equipment failure, and eventually restored power at around 10:30 p.m. — after the event was over.
Mayor Justin Wilson says the city is now considering a “variety” of options to improve service.
“We are exploring a variety of options to improve the reliability of Alexandria’s electricity service,” Wilson said. “We continue to believe that Dominion can and should do more to build a more reliable and resilient infrastructure to serve the City.”
Wilson did not get specific on the options, and said that the City will release more information this week. During the outage, he tweeted out a strongly worded post, and said it was unacceptable that a central business district was plunged in darkness.
Blackburn said business was strong the following day, on Sunday, with support mainly coming from local customers.
“Once again, we are lucky to do business in such a great community,” he said.
The Dairy Godmother, on Facebook, said that it lost “400 kolaches and 1,500 donuts… due to the power outage.”
“We are so sorry we were closed,” the shop wrote. “We have the greatest staff in the greatest neighborhood with the worst power company (except for Texas), we will open at 9AM with Just Fine Donuts, today we have Pumpkin Cake donuts, plus all of our usual flavors of yeast and cake donuts. With luck by 10 we will have Sausage Cheese Kalaches. Custard by Noon with Pumpkin as the Flavor of the Day, Apple Crisp is the Treat of the day.”
Alexandria also sent a letter to Dominion asking them to step up their game earlier this year. There were 16 large-scale outages in 2020 affecting thousands of residents.
The following businesses lost power, according to Visit Del Ray:
Its a beautiful day… but unfortunately… we have a difficult outage in Alexandria. We apologize & appreciate your understanding.
Here’s what happened & what @DominionEnergy is doing to restore power as quickly & safely as possible: https://t.co/nGN8oEw1Gf
— Peggy Fox (@PeggyDomEnergy) October 2, 2021
Yesterday Del Ray enjoyed an incredible return to Art on the Avenue. However, due to the power outage many restaurants on the Avenue had to close. They're back and need your support!
Check out @visitdelrayVA on Facebook for a list of restaurants & hours:https://t.co/RR10I3H3f3
— Del Ray Citizens (@DelRayCitizens) October 3, 2021
Please head down to Del Ray tonight and support the restaurants and retailers impacted by yesterday’s power outage, or else you’ll see more of @BillofDelRay on your television…
Consider yourself warned… pic.twitter.com/CVoMXJAZLZ
— Justin Wilson (@justindotnet) October 3, 2021
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