CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Some 70,000 West Virginians were without power Thursday night and many can expect to be without electrical service into the weekend, according to the two major electric companies.
“We just need to set the expectation that this is a multi-day event that will no doubt go into the weekend,” Mon Power spokesman Todd Meyers said Thursday night following a day of crews responding to hundreds of line breaks because of heavy, wet snow.
Mon Power had more than 40,600 customers without service heading into Thursday night. The most were in Wood County with approximately 5,700 customers out of service. The utility reported Harrison (4,500), Marion (3,600) and Monongalia (2,800) counties were heavily impacted also.
“It’s going to be a couple of days before everyone gets their power back. The majority should be back in by midnight Saturday,” Meyers said.
The snow snapped trees and limbs that fell into lines and power poles.
Appalachian Power crews worked throughout Thursday on broken lines but made little progress on the overall outage numbers.
“We increased outages just in Cabell County alone 4,000 or 5,000 more because the snow laying in those trees is still very heavy,” Appalachian Power spokesman Phil Moye said.
That company was reporting 35,000 customers without service heading into Thursday night. Moye expected the outage numbers to go up again Friday.
“As long as that snow is in the trees, it’s still weighing them and making it even more likely that the trees are going to buckle under that weight and fall and cause new outages,” he said.
There were still 8,901 customers in Cabell County without service heading into Thursday night. High numbers were also reported in Putnam County (7,700), Kanawha (5,100) and Mason County (4,800).
Appalachian Power summoned 250 workers from Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana to help but some customers still won’t have service back on until the weekend.
“There’s a lot of work ahead of us. We have a bunch of people in here help, but even with that we’re going to working for some time to get everyone’s power restored,” Moye said.