CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Crews from Appalachian Power have been busy this week working to restore power outages as quickly as possible.
“Most all of it is due to heavy loading,” said Appalachian Power Spokesman Phil Moye. “Fortunately, the number of incidents we’ve had are fairly isolated.”
Tuesday night and Wednesday morning power was lost to about 6,200 customers across southern West Virginia in 10 separate outages. The biggest was in Mingo and Wayne counties where more than half of the outages happened.
“By far the biggest problem we have is in Mingo County and Wayne County,” Moye said. “We had a line that feeds over from Kentucky and we had some line down there. That had close to half of our total customers in that area.”
Moye said the Appalachian Power delivery system is designed to be robust and handle the kind of loads called for when the temperatures drop to the single digits and below. He said overall the equipment is handling the rough weather well, but without fail something always breaks when it receives too much stress. Moye said in those cases they work as quickly as possible to get the lights and heat back on.
Earlier this week Appalachian Power called on customers to reduce their usage and conserve electricity. Moye said that notice has expired and while they still suggest conservation, the concerns which came from a regional grid service provider are no longer a factor.