MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — It could be Saturday before power is fully restored in parts of West Virginia following Tuesday’s severe thunderstorms that moved across the state from the Ohio River to the Shenandoah River — en route from the Midwest to the Northeast.
Holly Kauffman, president of FirstEnergy’s West Virginia Operations, said some of the toughest fixes remain on the restoration list.
“We’re down to a lot of scattered outages with very significant damage, where you spend a lot of time getting the damage repaired, but it only brings in several customers with each repair that’s completed,” she said.
FirstEnergy is the parent company of Mon Power and Potomac Edison. As of Thursday morning, ongoing outages were spread across that service area.
By Thursday night, the goal was to bring the outage numbers for Mon Power and Potomac Edison down to around 5,000. Heading into the weekend, though, there could still be an estimated 2,000 outages remaining in parts of Parkersburg, Clarksburg, Bridgeport, Grafton, Kingwood, Weston, Buckhannon and Jackson’s Mill.
“Those are the outages that really take a lot of work to get one or two individual homes up and running,” Kauffman said.
At times during Tuesday’s storms, winds were clocked at more than 70 miles per hour. Once the storms moved out of West Virginia, a total of 71,000 Mon Power and Potomac Edison customers did not have power.
“With the significant damage that we had during this storm….the linemen and everybody out there, they’ve really done a significant, fantastic job — in my opinion — of getting the customers back on as quickly as possible,” Kauffman said on Thursday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
See the updated outage numbers from FirstEnergy here.