Power surge knocks out electrical service in parts of D.C. region 

Power surge knocks out electrical service in parts of D.C. region. A piece of metal breaking loose from a power line 43 miles southeast of the District momentarily knocked out electricity to the White House, State Department and wide swaths of the nation’s capital and Maryland suburbs early Tuesday afternoon. But many in the city barely noticed. The outage threw scores of public and private office buildings off the grid, but in most cases, the lights stayed on because backup generators kicked in. That wasn’t true everywhere. A dozen people were trapped in stalled elevators, passengers were left searching for exits in darkened underground Metro stations, and a building full of Department of Energy employees and the main campus of the University of Maryland closed their doors. Thousands of visitors at Smithsonian museums on the Mall had to leave for hours. While the outage caused little more than a blip for many others, it took most of the afternoon to fully restore electricity. The outage immediately caught the attention of national security officials, who have heightened their scrutiny of vulnerabilities of the U.S. electricity grid after recent reports that nations such as China and Iran have infiltrated U.S. power company networks. Homeland security officials concluded Tuesday that terrorism had played no part in an outage that was quickly blamed on the failure of a simple piece of transmission equipment in southern Maryland. Energy experts cast Tuesday’s event as a mundane occurrence that happens daily on a small scale. Rarely, and memorably, it occurs on a larger scale, said Michael J. Assante, an electric power industry expert and director at the SANS Institute, a cybersecurity training organization. One example: the 2003 power outage in the Northeast that resulted in 50 million people losing electricity for up to two days — the biggest blackout in North American history. In that incident, multiple major electricity lines failed, causing a domino effect from the Midwest into Canada and the Northeast. On Tuesday, the system worked. Just one line failed, and the system recovered soon after the ripples were felt in the District. Parts of the electrical grid disconnected themselves to prevent further damage.