Damage from Friday night’s storm. (Photo by Jon Grant)

More than two days after an freakish thunderstorm battered the Washington area, 46,000 Pepco customers in D.C. are still in the dark, and it may be days still until the utility restores power. On Sunday, Pepco announced that it expects it will be Friday night before 90 percent of the affected customers get back online, a disconcerting forecast for a week in which temperatures are expected to continue to hover well above 90 degrees.

And Pepco, which struggles to engender much appreciation from its customer base in D.C. and Maryland, isn’t getting much of a break from the District government. Discussing the news that it will be up to another five days before residents and businesses get the lights back on, a spokesman for Mayor Vince Gray was less than enthusiastic about Pepco.

“Obviously, we are not too happy about the length of time they are giving us, and are hopeful that they accelerate their response,” the spokesman, Pedro Ribeiro, wrote in an email.

But the effect of the storm, called a “derecho” for its pattern of intense wind blowing in a uniform direction, on D.C.’s livelihood is visible. D.C. Public Schools are closed today, as 15 schools were still without power yesterday. And traffic signals in pockets of the city are still out of service.

Meanwhile, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says that all Metrorail lines and stations are up and running, though some trains might run at limited speeds in areas where the third rail is used to feed electricity into other systems. Metrobus, however, is still pulling itself through the storm, with some two dozen routes operating along detours.

Efforts to restore power in other pockets of the region have proved far speedier than Pepco’s response to D.C. Dominion Virginia Power, which saw 900,000 customers lose power in Friday night’s storm, says that it has restored service to two-thirds of that number so far, and that it expects that amount to reach 90 percent by Thursday. Baltimore Gas and Electric reports that it has repaired service to around 412,000 of nearly 650,000 customers who lost power as of Monday morning.

Pepco, meanwhile, is straggling behind. With 443,000 of the utility’s customers going dark on Friday, the company managed to restore service to only 24 percent by Sunday evening, the Examiner reported. An unnamed D.C. official was even more blunt to the Examiner in assessing Pepco’s response time, accusing it of focusing more on its customer base in Montgomery County.

“There’s some question of how Pepco is divvying up its resources,” the official told the Examiner.

But a Pepco spokesman said that repair operations are not being prioritized based on geography. The work schedule depends on first restoring the company’s many substations in its service area, and familiarizing out-of-town repair crews with the local grid, said the spokesman, Clay Anderson.

Still, 236,000 Pepco customers in D.C. and Maryland are still without power, and the company is sticking to its projection that it won’t be until late Friday evening until they are all turned back on. “People are going to still be sweating without lights, without air conditioning,” Anderson said.

He said he understands customers’ frustrations, though, having watched customers spot service trucks and ask Pepco workers when their power would be turned back on.

“Nobody cares about the next door neighbor when the power’s out, and they shouldn’t have to,” Anderson said. He added that everyone at the utility is “on storm duty.”

Today, Pepco expects to receive help from crews arriving from as far away as Oklahoma, as the work to clear downed trees and repair broken power lines continues. But the estimation that some may still not have their lights on and air conditioning running until Friday is hardly comforting. The weather this week is forecasted to be slightly less stifling than last weekend’s but only by a difference of a few degrees.

The District announced that three Department of Parks and Recreation facilities serving as cooling centers will remain open overnight—the North Michigan Park Recreation Center at 1333 Emerson Street NE, Kennedy Recreation Center at 1401 Seventh Street NW and Southeast Tennis and Learning Center at 701 Mississippi Avenue SE.