No Power - Thank Goodness We Weren’t in the Elevator

We just got back home from picking up groceries at Harris Teeter. That meant an elevator ride from the parking space to our condo. Just as we settled down, everything went quiet - eerily quiet. The usual humming and noises and sounds stopped, the Wi-Fi quit, and the peep hole view looking in to the hallway was dark. The emergency light in our den was on, so I knew it was not just our condo. The office building across the street was dark. So I searched the internet for power outages and it was noted in our area. I checked dominion energy and logged in our problem and it indicated there was an outage that would be addressed between 5-10 PM. The next door digest app was full of neighbors saying they were experiencing the same thing. Verizon sent an email and text that service was disrupted. The condo building sent a text that the power was out widespread in our area. My question was - why didn’t the building generator kick in? That was one of my first questions before we bought a condo here. When we lived on Capitol Hill probably one of the few perks was underground electric. We probably had 3-4 instances of power outages over 13 years, and those were due to human error. So I got my spare phone charging battery out and zapped my phone to full charge, thinking we may need our personal hotspot later in the evening. The power was restored about 2-3 hours later, just in time to prepare dinner. We still don’t know what happened nor did we get an explanation about the generator - yet. It just makes us realize how dependent we are on electricity and how utterly helpless one feels when it’s gone. Thank goodness we weren’t in the elevator.