Power outage at Virginia International Gateway leads to port backup

Power was out early morning Friday at the Virginia International Gateway, the privately owned Portsmouth container terminal leased by the Port of Virginia, leading to a several-hour halt in service while electricity was restored and the terminal’s systems were restarted.

According to port spokesman Joe Harris, the outage occurred for about four hours, and electricity was restored by 9 a.m. However, it took about two more hours, until 11 a.m., for all of the terminal’s systems to be back online and operating, he said. VIG is one of the port’s two main container terminals.

“You don’t want to rush it back online and cause a problem,” Harris said.

According to Dominion Energy spokesperson Cherise Newsome, the outage was reported to Dominion around 6:40 a.m. “Our crew assisted the Port of Virginia and found a fault on the power equipment,” she said in an email. “Power was restored around 9 a.m.”

Truck gates at VIG reopened at about 11:30 a.m. Friday, according to the port’s website, and the terminal’s truck gates will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday to handle any delayed traffic from Friday.

Truck gates will also be open all day Saturday at the Pinner’s Point Container Yard, the Portsmouth Chassis Yard and the Reefer Service Area. Typically the gates are closed during the weekend.

According to the Port of Virginia’s weekly metrics, there were more than 16,000 gate transactions a week at VIG in March, which averages to more than 3,000 transactions a day.