Just days after Dominion Energy’s feed failure darkened large sections of Manassas, a separate power outage hit the city’s downtown area early Wednesday, October 16 — this time caused by a blown manhole inside the city’s own distribution system.
City spokesman Jeremy Beale said the incident was unrelated to the Dominion outage on October 11, which knocked out the Battery Heights and Prince William substations and affected about 6,000 customers.
“The October 16 outage originated within the City’s own distribution system and was confined to circuits 101 and 103, which serve the downtown area,” Beale said in an email. “Outages were initially reported along both sides of Stonewall Road and Grant Avenue north from Center Street.”
According to Beale, electric on-call crews responded immediately and traced the issue to a blown manhole at Church and West Streets (V-E9), with another nearby manhole showing potential damage. Crews isolated the fault and restored power to most customers by 3:23 a.m., leaving only one remaining outage at 9210 Church Street, where the fault originated.
“This event did not involve the Battery Heights or Prince William substations and was not related to the previous Dominion Energy issue,” Beale added. “The outage affected a limited number of customers in the downtown area and lasted roughly two and a half hours.”
The October 11 Dominion outage, by contrast, left thousands without power after transmission problems outside the city’s control disabled two major substations. City utility crews managed to reroute some customers to other substations while Dominion worked to restore service.
Manassas has invested in new backup systems and upgraded equipment since a series of transformer and relay failures at Battery Heights in 2023. Officials say those improvements helped limit the scope and duration of this week’s downtown outage.
Residents can monitor live outage information via the city’s Power Outage Mapper for updates.
