Washington power outage tests telework plans

A power outage in Northeast Washington put three agencies' telework plans to the test. The power outage, which was caused by damage to a number of underground electrical cables, affected the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the General Services Administration's main building, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. All three federal buildings are located within about half a mile of each other near First Street and between H and P streets in Northeast Washington.

About 50 emergency personnel at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission worked from home or from an alternate site while power was out at the agency's main building on First Street, spokeswoman Mary O'Driscoll said. Some of the more than 1,100 nonemergency employees at FERC's Washington office also telecommuted on Wednesday, but it's unclear how many employees could not work from home and so were forced to take administrative leave, the spokeswoman said. FERC restored email and desktop virtualization systems enabling telecommuting early in the day, she said. Fifty-one percent of FERC employees are unable to work outside the office because of an electronic or other type of barrier and 23 percent more do not telework by choice, according to a 2010 Office of Personnel Management report on the government's telework capacity, suggesting that many of FERC's Washington staffers were unable to do their jobs Wednesday.