Montgomery County, Sarah Jacobs, Pepco discussed on WTOP 24 Hour News
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Good evening, I'm Sarah Jacobs with the top local stories we're following this hour beginning with breaking news in Montgomery county, a small plane has crashed into a power tower Pepco tower in the area of rothbury drive and goshen road in Montgomery village. The Montgomery county fire and rescue PIO said on Twitter, the plane is dangling a hundred feet in the air, and that the pilot ended up passenger our trapped. The incident has caused a very widespread power outage affecting Rockville, Silver Spring, Germantown, Aspen Hill, Gaithersburg, Pepco reports nearly 80,000 customers are without service, one of them is our colleague Nick an alley in the Wheaton area. Yeah, I was just hanging around my house. It was going to be a quiet calm Sunday evening, and all of a sudden the lights just went out immediately. I took my phone, turned on the flashlight, went over to the circuit breaker, flicked it on and off, nothing happened. So right then I knew that something was going on. I went out into the neighborhood and it had already been dark outside, and all the street lights were out. All of my neighbors houses were completely pitch black. It was difficult to see, so I got in my car, I started driving around noticing that major intersections around this area are out. The lights are out, no red or green lights, so for a Georgia avenue in our Cola, for example, in the Wheaton area, George is just zooming back and forth, all the traffic going back and forth, our Cola can't get past on Georgia. And that's just one anecdote, one small story from this, it's clear that thousands of people are without power because as I continue driving all around, I can see the street lights are out, the houses are out This is a big deal. Pepco estimates, it'll have power restored sometime tomorrow afternoon, 6 O 5. And now a special update from the WTO traffic center. And as you might expect, this massive power cut is going to be expecting traffic signals all over Montgomery county, especially localized going to see a lot of response near the air park shady grove road goshen road snot for school road. You're going to find a lot of response there. That's going to be affecting traffic at random points where they try to pinpoint things to get things straightened out, but certainly the signal lights darkening throughout Montgomery county is going to call for a lot of caution on driver's part new treating all of those