Leesburg Family Self-Reliant In Face Of Outages

As some west and northwest Loudoun residents embark on Day Three of power outages in the wake of this week's damaging storms, the DeLeonardis family is coping well.

"The first few months after we moved here, the winter hadn't even arrived yet and we were already experiencing power outages, so we figured we should do something about this. Now we have a wood stove, generators and our solar panels," said Lisa DeLeonardis.

Her family's 30-acre horse farm on Old Waterford Road just outside Leesburg is by no means 100 percent functional, but she, her husband and three children can do such things as refrigerate their food, use the Internet, watch television, keep the lights on and take showers, albeit cold ones. "It's actually very refreshing," DeLeonardis said of the chilly bathing.

The DeLeonardis' purchased the farm nearly five years ago and in that time, according to DeLeonardis, they have never experienced outages lasting this long, even through the roughest of storms.

According to Dominion Virginia Power's Web site, the company has restored power to 300,000 of the 335,000 customers affected by the high-intensity thunderstorms that passed through the area Wednesday, DeLeonardis says several of her neighbors are still without service. "Our neighbors-they're losing all their food, they are really struggling," she said.

"Especially right now a lot of families are going to be fighting it out. How long can you visit someone while the power is out-if its more than a couple days, bottom line is that you have to go home and deal with it. I'm thinking if the power companies could restore power they would've done it by now, so I'm guessing they can't do it," DeLeonardis said.

Approximately two years ago the DeLeonardis' contacted Charles Bigelow of Light Speed Power, Inc., a physicist and environmentalist based in Round Hill. He and his crew installed a large solar panel on the south side of the DeLeonardis home, dug large trenches and constructed an "underground chamber" beneath the family home, which houses the batteries that store energy collected from the sun. The whole operation cost some $30,000 and involved changing over many of the electrical panels in the house to be compatible with the solar panels.

Though she did not have exact figures, DeLeonardis estimated energy collected from the panels reduces their monthly electric bill by about 30 percent. The energy constantly feeds into the home's electrical system, with any deficiencies supplemented by electricity they pay for "from the grid."

The family would like to install even more panels, "the whole operation is a growing process," said DeLeonardis.

"We had this situation in mind [when the panels were installed]. We are not sitting around predicting doom and gloom, but it's all over the country and world-things are happening drastically," she said.

Though she and her family remain thankful for their advance resourcefulness, DeLeonardis harbors a significant amount of worry for her neighbors.

"Its supposed to get really hot this weekend-that's going to be really hard on people, especially those who need electricity for life support, to maintain machines, medical devices, or what have you-those people are suffering. Even if you use a generator, they suck up so much gas and the price of gas is so high. But, where there is a will there is a way. People get very creative when we have to rise to the occasion."