UPDATE: Strong Storm Hits Pr. George's, Over 2,500 Pepco Customers Affected
A strong storm swept through Prince George's County Thursday afternoon affecting thousands of Pepco customers.
This story was updated at 6:34 p.m.
More than 2,500 Pepco customers lost power because of an unexpected storm that hit the Prince George’s County area Thursday afternoon.
According to Pepco’s outage map, nearly 2,000 of those customers are located in the Upper Marlboro area near Crane Highway.
As of 6:30 p.m., a couple of hours after the storm swept through the county, 2,500 Prince George's Pepco customers were without power, according to a spokesperson.
BGE’s website showed 25 people in the county without power at the same time.
Bob Hainey, a spokesman for Pepco, told Patch four to five major power lines in the area were disrupted by the storm causing the outages. The majority of customers should have power restored by 8 or 9 p.m. tonight, he said.
"Pepco responded quickly," he said, adding that the storm caused downed trees and power lines.
The Maryland Emergency Management Agency tweeted this afternoon that the county could see a strong storm with possible “penny size hail and wind gusts in excess of 50 mph.”
The county spent most of the previous month recovering from the derecho that devestated much of the area in June and caused thousands of outages.
At this time, the Prince George’s County Police Department has not received any reports of major incidents resulting from the storm or outages, according Officer Edward Martin, a spokesperson with the department.
Dawn Mooney
5:19 pm on Thursday, August 2, 2012
Are those pictures of damage from today's thunderstorm??
John Davisson
5:22 pm on Thursday, August 2, 2012
Hi Dawn-- Those were actually file photos from June's derecho—sorry for the confusion! --John
Dawn Mooney
5:59 pm on Thursday, August 2, 2012
Ah, I was really surprised thinking that damage was from today's storm!
Don Risher
8:22 am on Friday, August 3, 2012
We are busy upgrading NG gas meters, pulling the 3 required permits; (Electrical, Mechanical and Plumbing & passing the inspections) and then installing standby generators for a lot of Prince George's County home owners.
Don Risher VP
BelairEngineering.com