Shoppers at Norfolk's J.A.N.A.F. Shopping Center got an unwelcome routine this week: the lights went out, the registers stopped, and the stores closed early two nights in a row. A utility-pole fire triggered the first outage on Sunday, and a fallen tree limb caused the second on Monday, sending customers out into a dark parking lot and leaving traffic signals on North Military Highway dead both nights.
According to The Virginian-Pilot, lights inside the center's retailers began flickering before 7 p.m. Sunday before going out entirely. A Dominion Energy spokesperson told the outlet that a utility pole had caught fire, an outage that affected nearly 800 customers. Electricity for most of those customers was restored about an hour and a half later, though Dominion said some remained without power later into the night.
A Second Blackout Monday Hits Every Store
The outage repeated itself less than 24 hours later. A tree limb fell on a power line Monday, according to the same Dominion spokesperson cited by the Pilot, cutting electricity to roughly 780 customers in the Janaf area and knocking out power to every store at the shopping center. That outage was restored shortly after 6 p.m., the newspaper reported, but not before shoppers approaching the center after 5:15 p.m. were turned away.
More than a dozen retailers, including Dollar Tree and T.J. Maxx, stayed closed for the rest of Monday, and the Pilot's report noted that many stores posted handwritten signs telling customers they would not reopen after the outage. Drivers on North Military Highway near the shopping center faced dark traffic lights until at least 6:30 p.m. Monday, a continuation of the same signal problems that first appeared during Sunday's outage.
Fire Call Preceded Sunday's Shutdown
Sunday's incident carried an extra jolt of alarm: shoppers called 911 after spotting a fire on the east side of the shopping-center complex, per the Pilot's account. That blaze was tied to the utility pole that Dominion later confirmed had caught fire, cutting power before most customers' service was restored that night.
Not Janaf's First Outage This Month
The back-to-back blackouts at J.A.N.A.F. come after a rougher outage spread across Hampton Roads earlier in October. More than 20,000 people lost power regionwide on Saturday, Oct. 3, after salt buildup from a coastal storm settled on electrical equipment, according to wavy.com. Dominion explained that salt conducts electricity and damages equipment once activated by rain, and the utility warned at the time that outages could keep fluctuating overnight as drizzle and misty rain set off more salt-related failures.
That Oct. 3 round of outages also knocked out traffic signals around Norfolk, prompting police to respond to intersections across the city, wavy.com reported separately. As of 6:17 p.m. that evening, officers were still assessing reported trouble spots and directing traffic by hand. Dominion said at the time it was replacing and upgrading damaged equipment as crews worked to restore service, though this month's J.A.N.A.F. outages were attributed to the unrelated causes of a utility-pole fire and a fallen limb rather than the earlier salt buildup.
