HENRICO COUNTY, Va. — A Henrico County woman is calling on Dominion Energy to take a more proactive approach to prevent repeated power outages that she and her neighbors have experienced in recent months.
A Dominion spokesperson said the company is aware of the problems impacting her neighborhood and is taking steps to address them.
7 power outages in 4 months
The tranquility of Eastern Henrico is why Alexandra Cromer, and her farm animals including horses and chickens, love calling it home.
“It’s truly my favorite place I’ve ever lived," Cromer said.
But with all the positives has come a recent downside: repeated power outages.
The Varina resident said her electricity, supplied by Dominion Energy, started going out at an unusually higher frequency this past summer, even on sunny days.
Data from the Ting app, which tracks her outages, showed seven power loss events from June through September.
Five of them lasted nearly an hour or longer, and one of them lasted more than 15 hours.
“It is, and this is a very privileged thing to say, one of the most inconvenient things I've ever had to face," Cromer said.
While Cromer has been able to energize at least portions of her house with a generator during those outages, she said she's had to make uncomfortable choices.
"I'm having to make decisions that affect my entire quality of life. But I can only have one, so I'm either going to be really sweaty and hot and not waste the food in my refrigerator, turn on my well to be able to feed my animals, but I can't have all of them," Cromer said.
The problems, she said, extend beyond her home.
Cromer said she and her neighbors have identified issues within the same service area.
“We’ve been calling it, locally, the trapezoid of doom," Cromer said.
Dominion points to tree-related issues
CBS 6 reached out to Dominion to ask about the root cause and what the company is doing about it.
The company said all of the outages at Cromer's address are tree-related, except one that involved a lightning strike. Dominion added that most happened during storms, while some appear to have been tied to dying tree-limbs falling on the lines.
The company said it performed tree trimming and vegetation management on this line in 2024, has since returned to do more work, and has even more work planned for the future.
"We are aware the customers in this area have experienced several recent outages. We are taking immediate steps to address issues impacting the reliability in this neighborhood our customers expect and deserve. We have identified short-term solutions, such as additional tree trimming and vegetation management, and longer-term solutions that involve equipment upgrades to improve reliability," Dominion Energy spokesperson Craig Carper said in a statement to CBS 6.
The issues are not new for this area.
CBS 6 interviewed another Eastern Henrico resident last year who also complained of repeated power outages.
“I feel like at this point, I live in a cave," Angela White told CBS 6 at the time.
In her case too, Dominion pointed partly to tree-related issues.
“If you're aware that trees and trees on the power lines is a problem, why are you not being preventative? You know that it's a problem," Cromer said.
Another challenge that Dominion noted is that in rural areas, it has a reduced ability to switch customers to other circuits during an outage while repairs are being made.
That's something the company said it's looking to upgrade.
According to Dominion, none of the outages referenced in this story were caused by data centers.
Cromer's fear, however, is if reliability is already a concern, what could happen as such development continues to add pressure to the grid.
“If you could deliver a message to the Dominion executives directly through this story, what would you want to tell them?” reporter Tyler Layne asked Cromer.
“You have the capacity to do better, so let's do it," she said.
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