It's still candlelight dinners and ice cold showers for some University students living off-Grounds who have not yet had their power restored following Hurricane Isabel's Thursday night visit to Central Virginia.
The Charlottesville area still had 6,680 customers without power as of yesterday afternoon, Dominion Power spokesperson Richard Zuercher said. In Northern Virginia, 21,000 customers lacked power yesterday and in Hampton Roads 307,000 customers had no power.
Dominion and City officials could not describe exactly where the majority of the remaining outages in Charlottesville were, describing them as scattered throughout the city.
Zuercher said Dominion hopes to restore power to 75 percent of the 606,000 Virginia customers that were without power yesterday by tomorrow.
"Much of the damage was very significant and some customers will have power out longer than Thursday," Zuercher said. "We expect to have the Charlottesville area completed by Thursday."
Zuercher said Dominion is working to restore power as quickly as possible with its 11,000-strong crew, but that the task is not easy.
"It does take time to restore a system that took 40 years to build and we're having to rebuild much of it," he said.
Chief Housing Officer Mark Doherty reported that most University housing had power restored by Friday evening, although Gooch-Dillard -- the last University area to have power restored -- did not have the lights back on until Saturday evening.
Fourth-year College student Marianne Brown, who lives in a CBS Rentals-owned building on 15th Street, has been without power since early Thursday night and has had to adjust her life significantly in dealing with the blackout.
Brown said it is annoying to have to spend "every waking moment in the library" when papers are due, but that the greatest inconvenience is not having any hot water at home.
"The worst part is how we take cold showers if you don't want to pack your life up and go shower somewhere," she said.
Students expressed varying opinions about the expediency of Dominion in restoring their electricity.
Fourth-year Education student Katie Hein, whose Cabell Avenue house did not have power restored until yesterday morning, said she understood why Dominion had to take its time in getting to her house.
"It was disappointing that it took so long, but then I also understand that there are people all over Virginia and Maryland that don't have it," Hein said. "I don't think it was laziness. It was just the emergency situation."
Brown, however, said she was disappointed by Dominion's focusing its power restoration efforts mainly on those areas with massive outages.
"I feel like they're just not as concerned with the lower priority areas," she said. "That's pretty disappointing."
Contrary to electrical issues, phone service interruptions affected only a small number of Charlottesville customers, according to Sprint spokesperson Tom Matthews.
"Charlottesville proper had 500 [customers] out tops at any given time," Matthews said. "Charlottesville is in very good shape."
City spokesperson Maurice Jones said exercising patience is important for those residents still without power.
"We know that the job is very difficult for Dominion Virginia Power and we know that they've been working pretty hard," Jones said. "We certainly have been asking the citizens of our region to be as patient as possible during the crisis."
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