Yesterday’s 15th and F Street NW Transformer Fire

Posted by pqresident

August 15, 2010

An underground transformer fire on F Street almost at the corner of 15th Street NW on the south side caused billowing smoke and emptied the downtown Willard and W Hotels of people yesterday evening around 7:30 pm. The incident was finished by approximately 11 pm and the streets reopened by 11:30 pm. All the major local news outlets were all over this incident within 30 minutes of its breaking. Most notable was TBD.com’s coverage which used some novel tricks to provide evolving coverage of the event including posting a geotagged Twitter link [today’s TBD tweet summary here] that let users see real time streaming of tweets near that location as well as information from WeLoveDC, part of the TBD Community Network. The Washington Post went with a blog post for breaking coverage and a news story today for the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say). Local news coverage is a changing!

One of our intrepid guest writers, LiveAndWorkInPQ, was on the scene and provided the photos for this post.