Storm Warning

When the power goes out in movies, it’s often directorial shorthand for something really bad happening. A demon is making its presence known. A serial killer is cutting electricity to the house. Dinosaurs are escaping their enclosures because for some reason it didn’t occur to anyone in charge of the theme park that relying on a stable power grid in a hurricane-prone region would be problematic. But here in Alexandria a power outage is slightly less portentous—it just means we’re having yet another pop-up thunderstorm and our local tree branches are quiet quitting directly onto Dominion infrastructure. It’s a time-honored regional summer tradition up there with surprise fireworks and wandering around Del Ray on a Saturday night wondering where the hell everyone went.

Since we are nonconsensually unplugged so frequently at this time of year, it’s really important to be ready, and your co-authors take that responsibility seriously. Do we own emergency radios? Well, no. Are we setting aside one gallon of water per person per day, plus extra for pets? Not exactly. Do we have fully stocked bars and seventeen candles from Red Barn Mercantile in a range of seasonally appropriate scents? You bet your ass we do!!! However, preparing our community as a whole for these incidents is a little more complicated and since the power seems to be going out pretty much everywhere in town these days (except unfortunately the White House), this seems like a good time to check in on Alexandria’s ability to weather these storms.

Preparedness is increasingly important because climate change is causing shifts in precipitation patterns and an increase in extreme weather events throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Virginia’s first-ever climate assessment, released last fall, explained that our commonwealth’s “electric grid, which depends heavily on overhead distribution lines and includes substations in low-lying and flood-prone areas, was not designed for today’s weather extremes.” As a result, power outages are multiplying faster than algae in the Reflecting Pool and Virginia is not surprisingly in the top 10 states most affected by this problem. When the air conditioning stops working in Alexandria homes and it’s yet another record-hot day, we know it smells crazy in there (but seriously, not having access to cooling during a heatwave is very dangerous and studies show it leads to increases in mortality).

Having Dominion in charge of all this doesn’t inspire confidence on a good day, and we have a lot of questions now that they’re maybe merging with NextEra to create the world’s largest electric utility company. How will this affect our vulnerability to outages? Signals are mixed. On one hand, decisions will be made from farther away, reducing local control and accountability. On the other hand, they say that the two utilities’ combined resources will help fund investments in grid reliability. On the other other hand, NextEra recently had to pay $150 million to settle allegations that it was interfering in state elections by funding “ghost” candidates and spying on reporters—which sounds like it couldn’t possibly get worse until you find out all of this happened in Florida. Is this an “no utility could be shadier than Dominion”/“hold my beer” kind of situation? Looks like we’re about to find out!!

(On a slightly tangential side note, the stated reason for this merger is the exploding energy demand from data centers. Which, according to the Department of Energy, could also increase the risk of power outages 100 times by 2030. Yikes?)

With all this in mind, what should we be doing to make our city more resilient? We’ve been told in no uncertain terms not to hold our breath waiting for Dominion to bury our power lines, so what are some other actions we can take into our own hands (other than literally burying the power lines with our own hands, which sounds messy)? In the near term the city can provide cooling centers where people can hang out if they lose power—though those facilities also need power in order to stay cool. We can also increase our local tree canopy to keep our neighborhoods shadier—noting also that trees are often the reason for the power outages, so our trimming and pruning game needs to be on point.

Longer term, deploying more distributed clean energy like rooftop solar and battery storage would keep the lights on during blackouts while also helping us reduce climate pollution. The city should keep incentivizing these systems as much as it can. Let’s get the schools done too!! 

But at the risk of inciting a fresh round of “15 minute city” tinfoil hat theories on the neighborhood listservs, it’s important to acknowledge that one of the best ways to become more resilient during power outages is to lean into urban density and the benefits that it provides. Blackouts can make it hard to get around by car—gas stations lose power, traffic lights go out, electric vehicles can’t charge—but people still need food, medicine, and other necessities. Dense walkable neighborhoods don’t just send the Alexandria Times editorial board into DEFCON 1, they also make sure we can get what we need when the only way to get it is on foot. They create redundancy: if one store or facility loses power, there may be another nearby. They bring people together, literally, creating more opportunities to build social connections that we can rely on in a crisis. When we create more housing, family members can live nearby, service workers can remain local, support networks are denser—all of which help during emergencies.

The last thing we want to flag as part of this conversation is that outages hit different people and neighborhoods differently. If you work remotely, rely on medical equipment, have kids at home, can afford a hotel, own a car, have a disability, live in an apartment, depend on Alexa for basic executive functioning, crave the adrenaline rush of keeping your phone battery below 20% at all times, or worship a vengeful thunder god, all of these factors affect who’s actually able to ride it out. The same inconvenience isn’t equally inconvenient for everyone. We should be thinking about what we can do to make this situation easier for those for whom it’s hardest (not sure what we can do about the thunder god though, he seems like a real dick).

Just like it’s been doing with flooding and urban heat islands (two climate threats we’ve written about in past issues), the city is taking steps to make sure we can adapt to a future in which our electricity providers continue to sporadically ghost us. The power will go out again, the only question is whether we’re building a community that can keep functioning when it does. Also whether we bought enough candles. 

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• It’s Juneteenth! The city is celebrating it with a number of events, including a memorial this morning at Douglass Cemetery, and a festival at Charles Houston throughout the afternoon.
• About a year after it first broke into public awareness, the animal abuse case at Your Dog’s Best Friend has reached a resolution (of sorts) with the sentencing of the dog groomer at the center of the story. This entire sordid affair has been tragic and upsetting, but it has also left us grateful and appreciative for the individuals and organizations in Alexandria committed to ensuring animal welfare and safety.
• Eater has a new list out highlighting Alexandria restaurants and while there are certainly some expected names and personal favs on here, overall the list is pretty damn random and has the vibe of someone distractedly mumbling “Claude tell me if they serve food in Alexandria” while doing a few other things at the same time. To be clear, we don’t know that for sure—but if Eater starts running cartoons about eating at Royal Restaurant the jig will be up without a doubt.
• News broke yesterday that Hotel AKA in North Old Town will rebrand as The Satire, part of the Marriott Autograph Collection (not to be confused with the Hilton Tapestry Collection or the IHG Vignette Collection or the Motel 6 Formica Collection). First of all, the Croatian national team is literally in the middle of staying here, isn’t anyone concerned that our beloved soccer hunks might get lost or confused on their way back from training? More importantly… The Satire? Did they land on this after finding out that Alanis Morrisette has exclusive IP rights to The Irony? Were The Allegory or The Parody too challenging from an SEO perspective? Luckily Alexandria is famously a city that loves and understands satire, so we’re sure this new brand will do great here.
• Last weekend’s Sails on the Potomac festival (more on this below) was opened by remarks from the honorary chair of VA250… Carly Fiorina? The former politician that we just wrote about four issues ago? Carly Fiorina who we hadn’t thought about a single time in the last sixteen years, but then we write about her two months ago and BAM she appears in Alexandria?? If this is an actual superpower of ours it appears to be highly conditional because we’ve written about Benito SO MANY DAMN TIMES and yet. In case this power only works to summon peripheral GOP figures from the early aughts we’re just going to have to be extra careful to never mention Bobby Jindal in these pages, lest he suddenly appears to cut the ribbon on a pizza place or something.

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Come Sail Away (Last week: NR). It was a top tier Alexandria weekend last week, with three days of tremendous weather and some great events in Old Town drawing people to our central tourism district. Both the Alexandria Jazz Festival (styled as “ALX Jazz Fest” which is surely making George Lucas feel some very confusing things) and Sails on the Potomac drew crowds of volunteers and participants alike. It was honestly all quite exciting! Think about it, the last time there were more than four tall ships anchored near Oronoco Bay was probably around the time Ulysses S. Grant was dog-walking local boy Bobby Lee through Spotsylvania County. We especially love our tall ships in Alexandria because it’s like someone is doing an incredibly elaborate and lifelike cosplay of the city flag. So it was a great Alexandria weekend, and the vibes were almost immaculate… with the scary exception of Mayor Gaskins ending up hospitalized with severe dehydration. She shared on social media about her ordeal, and thankfully she’s ok—and in the aftermath of that it’s a reminder to all of us to make sure to drink water when you’re out listening to jazz and pretending that Napoleon is master of Europe and oceans are now battlefields.
2. It’s a Beautiful Day in the Gayborhood (Last week: NR). Put on your rainbow tie-dye Pedro Pascal t-shirts, bitches, because it’s Pride Month in Alexandria!!! To celebrate, freshly elected state delegate Kirk McPike is co-chairing the campaign to pass a constitutional amendment that would permanently protect same-sex marriage in the Virginia Constitution. This measure is intended as a backstop against potential future rollbacks of federal rights and is necessary because unfortunately Samuel Alito is still alive. Closer to home, we’re excited for all the Pride events being held throughout the city over the next week including the city’s official festival (in its temporary new Carlyle location), West End Pride night at Port City, and Mount Purrnon’s DRAG BINGO WITH CATS. Very little information about the latter event is available on the cafe’s website but we need to know more. Do the queens have to take extra precautions to keep the cats from clawing their wigs off? Or are the cats the ones in drag??? Honestly if we get there and only the humans are wearing platform heels and fake cleavage we’re going to be extremely fucking disappointed.
3. Driving Me Mad (Last week: NR). As every Braddock Road resident knows, the city encouraging Alexandrians to ditch their cars and use alternate modes of transportation is nothing new—but in recent weeks they’ve piloted some fun new tactics we’re pretty excited about. Our local government’s official comms channels have started to take a sassier tone (“You can BOAT. You are practically a pirate”? Is this because of all the sea shanties??) and now Historic Alexandria is even giving out prizes for visiting its eight museums by bus, train, bike, or scooter. We can hardly wait to see what they try next. CaBi rental punch cards you can redeem for little treats? A citywide transit ridership contest with an online leaderboard to maximally deploy peer pressure (only possible now that Justin Wilson drives to work, otherwise there would be no point in anyone else even trying)? The only thing that worries us is what all this is doing to some people, psychologically. Anyone who’s used Facebook in the last six months knows what happens when we don’t acknowledge the unique and idiosyncratic circumstances in which any particular individual might need to travel by SUV to the Lyceum. What we’re saying is that while we love what the city is doing here, we hope they included a line item for “exploding heads” in the health department’s FY27 budget.
4. The Grass Menagerie (Last week: NR). There’s a petting zoo in the garden at Duncan Library tomorrow, featuring animals “like a llama, donkey, and mini cow.” This event is part of the Summerquest and Summerquest Jr. programs our libraries offer through support from the local library foundations and the Friends groups, which is great. What’s also great is the conditional advertising language that promises animals like the ones listed. Listen we get it, we’ve both had young kids, you’ve really got to work to manage expectations. If you say there’s going to be a llama, you’d damn well better produce a llama. But if you’re only promising an animal like a llama, well now we’ve got a world of possibility in front of us! Maybe that means a sheep (same curly fur), maybe that means an ostrich (same long neck), maybe that means a pigeon (same main character in an illustrated children’s book series energy). On the other hand a human in The Zebra’s mascot costume is also like a llama we guess, so tomorrow could be a crapshoot in either direction—but if you miss seeing a live elephant at Duncan Library tomorrow don’t complain to us, they tried to let you know.

Alexandria’s Hottest Club is… the World Cup

We’re just about one full week into the World Cup and it’s been a pretty fantastic tournament so far. The games themselves have certainly been great—including a sparkling USMNT performance as they thrashed Paraguay, and a couple all-timer minnows moments with Portugal dropping points to DR Congo, who also scored their first ever World Cup goal, and tiny Cape Verde gutting out a nil-nil draw against heavyweight Spain on the back of a heroic performance from 40-year old goalie and new social media sensation Vozinha—but beyond the games, it’s also felt like you can’t go anywhere in Alexandria without running into some aspect of this global celebration of sport.

Certainly a huge part of that has been the presence of the Croatian national team training in Alexandria. We’ve covered this more than a few times previously, but that was all in the speculative run-up to their arrival. They’re actually here now! And they got things started off in style with a massive open training session that brought in youth athletes, local VIPs, and lucky members of the public to see the team up close and personal.

Ryan Belmore from The Alexandria Brief has been providing excellent near-daily coverage while the team’s been in town, and the most interesting part has not been his bringing a hyper-local and human-interest angle to the team’s press conferences, it’s been that he’s pretty much the only English-language reporter covering the team, period (RIP Post Sports). It honestly feels slightly insane that one of the highest ranked teams in the world—one tapped to progress deep into this competition, recent victimization at the hands feet of Harry Kane notwithstanding—can’t draw an ink-stained wretch or two from one of our country’s major sports dailies. Their loss, honestly, all they’re missing is golden hour moments like this one that remind us why sports are evocative and meaningful and emotionally resonant.

They’re also missing out on the ceramic bowls. WHAT. WAS. THE. DEAL. WITH. THE. BOWL. At the cultural ceremony during the welcome event at Episcopal last week, Mayor Gaskins told the Croatian representative that the city was presenting the team with a “ceramic bowl” as a “symbol of hospitality.” Vice Mayor Bagley then proceeded to hand him a glass bowl. Unless a new variety of transparent ceramic was recently invented, and we feel like we would have heard about this, there could be no ambiguity on this point. It was glass!!! What happened here? Was there a ceramic bowl they were planning to give the Croatians that got broken or misplaced at the last second? Did they grab the glass bowl as a backup option and forget to update the talking points? It is possible they recycled the script from a previous diplomatic presentation that did involve a ceramic bowl? We [clap] Take [clap ] Our [clap] Crockery [clap] Seriously! The people demand answers. 

It’s been slightly disappointing (if not entirely unsurprising and understandable) to discover that the team will only be spending time at their hotel and training at Episcopal during their stay here, with the national team spokesman Tomislav Pacak quoted as saying “you won’t see Luka Modrić wandering the streets of Alexandria anytime soon.” That’s fine, that’s his loss. We guess Luka Modrić is just going to miss out on the charms of the second-ranked mid-sized American city for college graduates. They don’t just give out awards like that to anyone, Luka! It’s ok though, Croatia ultimately made it up to us by smuggling John Malkovich(!!) into the city to take part in a government celebration of the launch of their new hilariously unhinged tourism campaign featuring the actor best known for his role traumatizing high school English students in the mid to late 90s.

The only way Alexandria’s World Cup experience could be any cooler is if a second team was hanging around town but that’s impossible right? There’s no way the tenth best city to retire in according to Niche, the market leader in connecting colleges and schools with students and families, could have TWO national teams visit, could it?? Well Niche, you’d better bump us up to at least ninth on that list because we got a second team—that’s right GHANA has also been hanging around Alexandria! It turns out the Black Stars [Editor’s note: best team name in tournament, and we say that knowing full well there is a team in this tournament called The Eagles of Carthage] needed a hotel and an event space for a send-off event before continuing on to their full-time training site. Two national teams! Take that Arlington (only ranked eleventh in the Niche rankings of best city to retire in).

Last but not least there have already been some epic watch parties, including an ASA organized event at Piece Out for the first USMNT game, absolute scenes at Gustave when France plays, and the delightfully named Slightly Overweight Fathers of Alexandria (SOFA) organizing an event with Croatia supporters. We can’t believe it’s only been one week, and if we carry on like this in the weeks ahead it’s unlikely Alexandria’s Hottest Club is going to be changing any time soon.

We Get Letters

Phoebe C. writes in this week, about Waymo:

Hi Jesse and Becky!

I wanted to weigh in on the Waymo conversation in this week’s newsletter. I was excited to see the news that Waymo is mapping Alexandria, and I think it will be a good step forward for quality of life in our region if the state legalizes self-driving taxis. I am a public transit enjoyer, and I also own a car. I have a few trips I take on a regular basis that are not feasible by transit (that is to say, the trips are to Fairfax County), so I drive. I avoid using Uber unless there is no alternative, because when I’m getting in a car driven by a stranger, there are not-insignificant odds that the stranger in question is an unsafe driver. Because my car often sits for a few days at a time without being driven, I’ve been having irritating and expensive issues lately with my engine compartment getting invaded and eaten by rodents. Between that and the recent news that the average new car is now $50k, I’ve been thinking lately that if Waymo or other self-driving taxi companies become widely available in the DMV, I will never buy another car. As you mentioned, they are better at following the law than Maryland drivers. They are much safer than even the average Virginia driver. Abi Olvera from DC Abundance wrote a great article recently about how if self-driving taxis become cheaper as the technology scales, they will be a game-changer for many of the poorest Americans to get to work reliably and safely at a reasonable cost and ditch the huge expense of car ownership. I want our region to make transit better, faster and more reliable to get people out of cars for more trips, but I also would love to have the option of a safe, reasonably priced car ride for when I go to Fairfax County.

This letter was going so well until right at the end there when you had to ruin it by mentioning Fairfax, Phoebe! You were really selling us on revising our opinion about Waymo with your thoughtful and excellent points about reducing car dependency, but then you had to throw in “Waymo will take people to Fake Alexandria” and now we’re back on our anti-robots bullshit. Good effort though, and thanks for writing!

One Awesome Thing in ALX

Summer camp season is in full swing and as we shuttle all over town picking our kids up from fulfilling enrichment activities and experiences that have full-time job convenient pickup times like 12:30pm and 3:45pm, we’re grateful to live in a place that has such a wide variety of summer opportunities.

One of the best of these is the summer camp at Winkler Botanical Preserve. Open to kids ages 5-12, this outdoor activities focused camp is a nearby, accessible chance to get kids out and interacting with the natural world. It’s remarkable that this is right in the West End, as you’d normally need to drive well outside the city limits for an experience like this.

Winkler is pretty special, and we should never take for granted the fact that we have these 44 acres of undisturbed wild space in our city to wander in and explore. So whether your kid is in camp there or you just want to catch your breath and slow down for an hour, find some time soon to get out and enjoy this gem of a public park.

You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.

ALXtra is a free-to-read newsletter about current events in Alexandria, Virginia. Subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox. Paid subscriptions give you access to the comments. Revenue from subscriptions gets used in the following ways: 1) a third goes into a charity fund, and every time that fund hits $500 we’ll make a donation to a local nonprofit in the name of ALXtra’s readers and we’ll feature and write about that organization, like we did here, here, here, here, here and here; 2) another third of the money will go toward investments in the newsletter; and 3) the final third of the money goes toward self-care for your two intrepid authors.