Power Outage Leaves Capital in Darkness

The lights went out in much of downtown Washington, plunging the Washington Monument, the National Theater and scores of shops and office buildings into darkness. The local power company said a generating station across the Potomac River in Alexandria, Va., failed around 8:30 p.m. The power was restored shortly after 9:30 p.m. Police lit flares at key intersections downtown. The blackout affected about 10,000 customers in the Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, Mall and Tidal Basin areas. The outage was triggered when a piece of electrical equipment and a circuit breaker both failed.