UPDATE: Downed Wires Knock Out Power to 7,900

UPDATE (3:05 p.m.)—Children at various elementary school’s entered their classrooms without electricity Monday morning after downed wires cut off power for about 7,900 Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) customers in Shady Side and Deale, according to Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) spokeswoman Moneka Monk.

Monk told Patch in an email that students from Deale, Lothian, Shady Side, Tracy’s Elementary school and Southern Middle did not have power until about 11 a.m. Monday morning.

“Buses were already en route to Southern Middle and we began working with BGE to get a prognosis for when the power might be restored,” Monk wrote.

Each school’s emergency power source operates for a period of time after power goes out and adjustments in the school’s schedule was made to convene in large groups for safety, supervision and warmth, Monk said.

The AACPS spokeswoman said the timing of the outage created a particularly tricky scenario. 

“All bus routes to all schools in the cluster would have to be complete before we could begin transporting students back home if we decided to close schools,” Monk told Patch. “Since the outage was area-wide, we also took into consideration sending students to homes without power, heat and supervision.”

All the schools regained power between 10:15 a.m. and 11 a.m. Monday.

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Original 12:05 p.m.—Downed wires near Solomon’s Island Road caused 7,900 customers to lose power Monday morning in Shady Side and Deale, a Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) spokeswoman said.

“We had some wires down and those lines serve one of our substations,” BGE spokeswoman Rachael Lighty said. “It happened around 7 a.m. this morning.”

Lighty said 7,800 of BGE’s customers had their power restored by 10 a.m. Monday morning, but the remaining 100 could be without power for an indefinite amount of time because the houses receive electricity directly through the downed lines.

BGE crews are working to repair the issue, but Lighty said she couldn’t give an estimate as to when the 100 customers will regain electricity.

The weekend’s heavy winds could have played a role in the downed lines, but Lighty said she didn’t have a specific cause for the fallen wires.

She said no road closures occurred because of the power outage or the BGE crews' work on the wires.

Did you lose power Monday morning? Tell us in the comments.