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Filed Under “Things Even Writers Can’t Make Up”
Sometimes as a writer we see something happen and are just like “If we put this in a book.”
Sunday night at about 5:40pm, a 66 year old Washington, D.C. lawyer attempting to land at an airfield in Gaithersburg flew his small plane straight into an aerial transmission tower. It was dark and rainy.
The plane got tangled in the tower, bending it and trapping him and his passenger until just after midnight. It took that long to fully deenergize the lines. Both survived, and were taken to hospital with serious injuries, including hypothermia from being trapped up there for hours.
Immediately after the tower was deenergized, nearly 120,000 people were without power. At least 85,000 were left in the dark for hours. Two Metro stations were left without power, one of them the home of the longest escalator in the western hemisphere. Both stations had to be closed, but appear to have reopened in time for the morning rush.
Amazingly, everyone had power back by the morning, despite the fact that the tower was damaged. Thankfully this happened in a high density area with plenty of grid redundancy.
This gave local schoolchildren the best of both worlds; by the time power was restored, the public school system had already canceled school.