If you’ve ever had a power outage resulting from a major storm you probably questioned, “when will they get to us”? Here are a few things I’ve learned dealing with Dominion Power over the years.

Outage Map – First things first, check the regional outage map which covers their entire service area. On any given random day you will find multiple blue and green dots scattered on the map. It’s the red dots you’re looking for. If you consider the average sub-division in our area is between 50-200 homes an outage of >2,500 will affect 10+ neighborhoods. These are very serious service interruptions that become the highest priority tickets for technicians to address. You can zoom in to see just the Northern Virginia outage map. These maps display well on mobile phones. Dominion has developed an interactive outage map which allows you to zoom down to your street.

It would seem to me that Dominion knows immediately how many homes have been effected so reporting your particular outage would be overkill. However, sometimes you may be the only house effected if a tree came down on your property and you have overhead power […]