Sirens at 6:00am?

I heard many, many sirens this morning. Any idea what they were for?

 

We were woken by the same thing. I saw fire trucks going down Claiborne. Was hoping someone here knew what it was all about

 

Same here, I hope everyone is ok if it was an accident or something.

 

firetrucks were in my neighborhood this morning. now several dominion gas trucks are in front of the house that the were at this morning. i'm guessing they must have smelled gas or something early this morning. hopefully, it's nothing major for that family. scary after what happened in california last week.

 

Do you mind saying where within Broadlands ? Just wondering.

 

off claiborne right before you get to croson lane. not gas related according to a neighbor, but electrical in nature. all is quiet so fire dept/dominion must have solved the issue.

 

I certainly heard them! It sounded like a lot of vehicles and went on for 15 minutes! Maybe not, I was half asleep. I've looked all over the web and can't find any info on this - washington post, loudoun independent, loudoun alerts, wjla, usa9 - nothing! Where's Stacie? She'll know - Stacie always knows what's going on!

 

Was it actually a fire?

 

Hey all. It was my house. Sorry for waking everyone up.

At 0549 this morning, the electric meter on the side of our house developed an electrical short. It dropped power to the house nearly immediately and sent sparks and a large fireball out through the panel. Two of my wonderful neighbors witnessed the event and called 911. They saw flames and sparks which happily quickly died down after the power separated from the fault. I was in my office and was outside within about 60 secs and the last of the flames were stopping, though the box did still pop a few times.

The Firemen, Van Metre and Dominion electric were excellent. Since the box is the entry point of power to the house, we believed (and proved to be true) that power was still present in the box. The Firemen did an inpsection of all the adjacent walls to ensure no internal fires. Using thermal imagers they verified that there had been no spread into the walls. They stayed until Dominion showed up (which was only about 30 mins which I consider excellent), and the Dominion guy secured power and we investigated.

Damage ended up being limited to the internals of the power meter. We were even able to save the box so that a different one did not need to be installed (ripping off siding and making new holes to mount it to the house). They did have to find and replace the cover due to the hole in it from the plasma fireball that came out.

Van Metre sent their electricians over and between Buhl Electrical and Dominion, we had power back in the house within 4 hours and the box looks like nothing happened.

The cause - power enters our homes through buried cables that come up through the PVC pipe below the meter. For the first couple years after construction, the grounds around the house sink as all the dirt settles that was disturbed during construction. This pulls on the buried cables, pulling them down the PVC pipe. Mine were not install well, had too little slack and it looks like were installed in a way that resulted in the pulling drawing one of the cables across the connection of the other live cable (there are three - 2 live, 1 common/ground). The moment that the insulation betwen the live lines was removed, the resulting currents melted everything within about 2 inches and created the fireball. Inspection of the foundation near the box gives an idea if there could be a problem, as it can show if the dirt has been sinking. No way to know about the internals without Dominion being there to open it.

Bottom line - no one hurt and we completely fixed.

Hope that helps.

 

wow! so glad you're okay.

 

I'm thrilled to hear nobody was hurt and there was no damage! I remember hearing siren after siren after siren and was fully expecting that Mill Run had gone up in flames... thinking, "This has to be BIG, whatever it is."

Glad you had excellent responses and all is well. Now... which one of our houses is going to go through this next... shall we start a poll?

 

I was thinking the same thing - whatever this is, it's got to be big! So I'm glad to hear all the details and am especially happy no one was hurt and no significant damage or displacement to Woods house.

 

I'm glad to hear everything is fine now.

Apparently we are really heavy sleepers 'cause we didn't hear a thing!!!