Airports, transit systems, power crews slowly get back on track

Posted: 11:33 am Mon, February 8, 2010
By Associated Press

Airports in the Baltimore/Washington region are working to get back to normal days after a blizzard dumped nearly 3 feet of snow in some parts of the area.

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport opened one runway Sunday evening, but airport officials warn that delays and cancellations will likely continue Monday.

Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia is running limited flights on two runways, and the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority says more flights will be added during the day.

Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., was slated to reopen at 10 a.m. Monday, with flights operating on a limited basis.

Officials don’t have an estimate of how many flights have been canceled but an airports authority spokeswoman says Reagan and Dulles handle about 1,400 flights daily during the week. A BWI spokesman says the airport typically handles about 630 flights daily.

Transit systems in the Mid-Atlantic region, meanwhile, are slowly starting to come back to life, but service is limited.

In Baltimore, there’s limited service on some bus routes, but the city’s Metro Subway is operating. The light rail is operating on a limited basis, but there is no service south of North Linthicum to Baltimore-Washington Marshall Airport.

There is no MARC service on the Camden and Brunswick lines, but the Penn line is running on a limited schedule.

Washington’s Metrorail is limited to underground service and its buses are operating on a very limited basis. Virginia Railway Express is not operating on Monday.

Finally, power crews are still working to restore electricity to thousands of customers in the mid-Atlantic.

Baltimore Gas and Electric, the dominant utility in central Maryland, reported Monday morning that 4,064 customers were still without power. The bulk of those customers — 1,420 and 1,022 — are in Anne Arundel County and Baltimore City, respectively. Another 757 are still without power in Howard County, which saw the biggest snow totals in region. BGE said it has restored power to almost 93,000 customers since the storm began and expects the remaining outages to be fixed by late Monday evening.

Pepco was reporting nearly 42,000 outages early Monday. Most of the affected customers are in Montgomery County, where officials have said it could take until the end of the week for crews to restore power to some customers.

Delmarva Power was reporting just less than 8,000 customers without electricity, almost all of them in Sussex County, Del.

The utility says it expects to have power restored to most of its customers by late Monday.

With more snow in Maryland’s forecast, state officials say it will be several days before they know how much battling the storm will end up costing.

As snow first started falling Friday, Gov. Martin O’Malley said the state already had spent about $50 million of the $60 million budgeted to keep the roads clear.

The governor noted that a snow storm in December cost the state about $27 million, and the storm over the weekend was expected to cost at least that much to easily push expenses above the budgeted amount.