Power has returned to Tysons Corner Center after an outage left the entire mall in the dark earlier this afternoon (Sunday).
It’s unclear exactly when the mall lost electricity, but Dominion Energy learned about the outage around 2:30 p.m., Aisha Khan, a Northern Virginia spokesperson for the utility, says.
A worker at the mall told FFXnow that all stores were affected except for Nordstrom.
According to Khan, Dominion crews determined that the outage was the result of a plow charged with clearing one of the mall’s parking lots pushing snow onto a transformer.
“[Snow] was piled up on top of one of our transformers and the moisture from that messed with it, causing a flash, hence the power outage,” Khan said.
She noted that plows aren’t supposed to pile snow on any electric transformers, adding that Dominion will have someone look into why that happened in the coming days.
Since the snow was cleared from a parking lot, not a street, the culprit was likely a contractor hired by Tysons Corner Center’s management, rather than the Virginia Department of Transportation.
Power was restored at Tysons Corner Center shortly after 5 p.m.
While power outages were relatively limited in Fairfax County last week, despite warnings of potential widespread damage from Winter Storm Fern, both Tysons Corner Center and its nearby companion Tysons Galleria lost power back in April 2022 as a result of an equipment failure.
In that case, it took two to three hours for Dominion Energy to restore power to both malls.
