Pepco repairs to an underground cable in the Luxmanor neighborhood will be delayed by a week and could mean a noisy next few days for some residents.
In a Friday email to Luxmanor Citizens Association President Jordan Cooper, Pepco region vice president for Maryland Affairs Jerry Pasternak said crews detected damage to another section of the underground pipe that contained a broken electrical cable.
It means Pepco, which had hoped to start installing a new cable in the pipe this week, must excavate portions of Sedgwick Lane. Some of that work will not be limited to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., meaning Luxmanor residents could get a repeat of the overnight generators, trucks and lights that caused a stir in the neighborhood last month.
The additional repair work will take place on Sedgwick Lane. The faulty part of the approximately 40-year-old cable was in a 1,500-foot section of pipe between Luxmanor Road and Old Georgetown Road. On Jan. 8, crews started the process of cutting through the pipe and removing the faulty cable.
The work hasn’t meant any power outages, as other power systems have picked up the slack.
The project is expected to be complete in March and will include more overnight work to pull the new cable through the pipe. In that case, crews must do 12-18 hours worth of non-stop work to ensure there is proper tension in the cable, Pasternak told the Luxmanor Citizens Association on Jan. 20.
At that meeting, Pasternak said Pepco should have done better at communicating the nature of the emergency repairs before overnight work began.
On Friday, Pasternak and a Pepco consumer advocate went door-to-door on Sedgwick Lane to describe the work in detail to affected homeowners. Portions of Sedgwick Lane will be closed off during the excavation work.
