BGE said a Sept. 3 outage in Parkville’s Cromwood Coventry neighborhood was caused by a fault on an overhead line, after residents reported popping noises, outages, fires and damaged equipment. Nick Alexopulos said the cause of the fault is still under investigation.
Beth Schmidt said she was home with her two high school-age kids when the lights cycled on and off several times around 7:30 p.m. “We heard pops. It was a lot. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to be out of power for days,’” she said. “Then someone knocked on my door and said, ‘Your backyard’s on fire.’”
Schmidt said the line also ignited bushes in her neighbor Jeff Karowich’s yard, and Eric Wicklein said controller boxes for his nursery’s water pumps were fried. More than 30 residents later listed problems they believed were tied to the Sept. 3 power surge at a Sept. 22 emergency community meeting, including blown light bulbs, fried surge protectors, tripped breakers, damaged appliances and HVAC systems.
Parkville complaints after Sept. 3 outage
Residents in the wooded neighborhood just north of the Baltimore Beltway said they heard popping noises and explosions on the night of Sept. 3, while people on a walk reported power lines vibrating and swaying. Schmidt said it was the third time in almost two years that the same corner of her yard had caught on fire after incidents she said involved a downed or arcing power line.
That same pattern has made the reports more than a single-night outage. Three house fires occurred on Haverhill Road after a Feb. 16, 2025 outage, and residents said multi-hour outages after major storms are not unusual. BGE said Parkville residents contacted the utility after both outages.
BGE reviews after two outages
BGE said those contacts prompted engineering reviews, field inspections, voltage monitoring and reliability assessments. Alexopulos said storms were affecting the service area over several days, but the utility could not definitively say the fault was caused by storm conditions. He also said engineers did not identify evidence of sustained abnormal voltage conditions on the electric distribution system.
Mumtaz Hussain Soomro, an engineering professor at the Community College of Baltimore County, said a power surge is a brief increase in electrical voltage that can damage appliances and electronics. For residents who lost lights, breakers, or equipment, the practical next step is to press BGE for the results of its engineering work and whether it will connect the Sept. 3 outage with the earlier complaints in Cromwood Coventry.
Bge Power Outage deadline provides another example of how utility deadlines can shape customer responses when service questions remain open.
Csd Berlin abgebrochen nach Vorfall mit 1 Toten und 14 Verletzten shows how quickly a single incident can become a broader public-safety issue when damage spreads across a neighborhood.
