WBJ: "Outages make Bloomingdale restaurants go black, see red"

See this Washington Business Journal article on Bloomingdale's recent Pepco power outages and their impacts on our retail businesses:
 

SUBSCRIBER CONTENT:  Aug 2, 2013, 6:00am EDT
Rebecca's Take
Outages make Bloomingdale restaurants go black, see red
Rebecca Cooper, Staff Reporter- Washington Business Journal

Several restaurants in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of D.C. had a rough few days in the last week. They’d been hit by multiple power outages, costing them thousands of dollars.

Boundary Stone bar and restaurant, The Red Hen, Bacio Pizzeria and Grassroots Gourmet had all been hit with intermittent outages since July 18, and they all took to Twitter to vent about it (see bottom right).

I spoke with Pepco spokesman Marcus Beal, and he said the company was working with the businesses to upgrade transformers, cables and other aging infrastructure in a neighborhood that’s swollen in size.

“This area has seen a tremendous amount of growth. Transformers are sized to a region and as customers are upgrading properties, that puts more of a demand on the existing infrastructure,” Beal said. “All of these outages have basically expedited work we were already doing.”

The final resolution, he said, could take a couple more weeks if more new infrastructure needs to be installed.

At Boundary Stone, the outages began with a partial outage July 18 that cut power to half the restaurant, including the walk-in refrigerator, said Gareth Croke, co-owner and general manager.

“That entails emptying the ice machine and trying to keep all proteins in the safety zone,” said Croke, who estimates he lost at least $11,000 in business from the back-to-back outages so far. “When you lose your refrigeration, [it’s] hectic trying to keep everything cold.”

Mike O’Malley, co-owner and general manager of The Red Hen, did give Pepco some credit for trying to get the power back on, noting that crews have replaced cables up and down the block. But the fact that D.C.’s summer is still in full swing was worrisome to him.

“It’s a scary thought that there’s six more weeks of this,” O’Malley said. “Our insurance companies are willing to work with us, but it’s out of our hands, so to speak.”