Washington area goes dark due to snowstorm

The Washington DC metro area got about 6- 12 inches of snow starting yesterday and that has pretty much brought the whole area to stand-still. Hundreds of motorists stranded on the GWParkway and thousands of homes and office are without power. Yours truly whose home and office happen to be in Pepco area has lost power in both places. I am doing this blog from a local library that has power but has lost its Internet connection.

Here are the number of customers without power from Pepco, BG&E and Dominion as of 2 p.m:

Pepco: 159,993

BG&E: 78,008 across Maryland

Dominion: 76,465 in Northern Virginia.

Besides that hundreds of traffic lights in the region are out  adding to the traffic mess. Pepco is so overburdened that it is not giving any estimate of when power will be restored - there are news reports from Washington Post that say it might be Sunday before the power is restored to all customers. In the meantime, we are hoping we get our power back earlier than that. Having spent several years in the Great Lakes region where I didn't experience an outage even with feet of lake effect snow, I am having great difficulty understanding why a few inches of snow brings the national capital to its feet.

P.S.: Looks like Mother Nature treats mere mortals and the powerful the same: President Obama's motorcade had to weave in and out of snow bound streets to get back to White House from Andrews AFB yesterday!