Delmarva Power crews are right back at it, working around the clock to make repairs and restore power for our customers. Friday’s extreme weather in the New Castle County area knocked out power to about 14,000 customers. Our initial assessments have found heavy tree damage and flooding caused extensive damage to the local energy grid in New Castle County and the surrounding area. Here’s what we are seeing.

A significant amount of work remains to repair the damage. In at least several areas the extent of the damage is so severe that entire sections of the local energy grid will need to be completely rebuilt in order to restore service for customers. We have identified five major power lines that serve as main sources of energy that have structural damage spanning entire sections and where much of it will need to be completely rebuilt.

The work will continue to be extremely labor intensive and very time consuming, as a multitude of fallen trees must be removed before repairs can be completed.

We understand that these outages are disruptive and are frustrating for customers who may have experienced multiple disruptions to their service this week as a result of Tropical Storm Isais. We are responding to outages as quickly as possible and appreciate customers’ patience as we work to restore service. While we just completed a multi-day restoration effort, Delmarva Power’s Emergency Response Organization is activated and hundreds of lineworkers and support personnel are responding to support our customers.

We urge our customers to stay away from downed wires and assume any downed wire is energized. To report an outage or downed wire, call 800-898-8042 or report and track through our mobile app or our website at delmarva.com/storm.