Power failure affects more than 39,000 customers

An electrical equipment failure knocked out power to about 39,000 customers in Washington as temperatures reached the low 90s Saturday, with most of those affected reported to be in the northwest quadrant of the nation’s capital, Potomac Electric Power Co. officials said.

Company officials did not have an estimate for when power would be restored.

As of 5:45 p.m. EDT, 25,000 customers still had no power, according to the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, which was urging motorists and pedestrians to exercise caution at intersections with no traffic signals and treat them as four-way stops.

Frank Tedesco, a spokesman for Potomac Electric Power, said the company had pinpointed the source of the problem. “There appears to be an issue with electrical equipment at our Florida Avenue substation,” he said.

The company said most of the customers affected were in the Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights neighborhoods. The White House was unaffected by the power failure. The company said it did not know what caused the equipment to fail or whether it was related to the heat.

Social media posts showed city firefighters responding to a building where a person was trapped inside an elevator, and others showed passengers waiting on the platform for the Metro.

Around 2:45 p.m., firefighters began responding to calls about smoking backup generators and automatic fire alarms, said Vito Maggiolo, a spokesman with the DC Fire and EMS Department.

While no injuries were reported, three hospitals, Howard University Hospital, Medstar Washington Hospital Center and Children’s National were affected. Maggiolo said some of the calls for stalled elevators came from Washington Hospital Center.

A representative at Howard University Hospital said it had been relying on backup generators since about 2:25 p.m.

Two of the city’s cooling centers — the Banneker and Columbia Heights community centers — were closed because of the power failure.