Potomac Edison Says It’s Restoring Power

Potomac Edison says the cause of the outage was equipment malfunction.

GERMANTOWN, Md. (AP) – Potomac Edison says an equipment failure knocked out power for thousands of customers in Maryland, with Montgomery County being the hardest hit.

Company spokesman Doug Colafella  says about 41,000 customers were affected by the outage, which occurred about 1:50 p.m. Monday. Service had been restored to about half of those customers within a couple of hours, and everyone was expected to be back in service by late afternoon.

At the height of the outage, about 29,000 customers were without power in Montgomery County. That’s 89 percent of Potomac Edison’s customers in the county.

Colafella says an equipment failure at a substation knocked out a major distribution line.

According to the Potomac Edison website:

49  customers are out in Frederick County;

941  customers are out in Montgomery County

12  customers are out in Howard County

11  customers are out in Carroll County.

A Potomac Edison spokesman says the outage was due to equipment malfunction in one of the company’s substations.