CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Repair crews from Appalachian Power spent much of Friday pulling burned-out circuits, wiring and other parts of a power vault from a downtown manhole on Virginia Street.
The vault exploded and caught fire Thursday afternoon, darkening several blocks of the downtown area for the night. Appalachian Power’s John Shepelwich said most of those outages were a deliberate attempt to contain the fire.
“When we were made aware of it, our protocol calls for isolating it and essentially to shutdown the rest of the underground network in that circuit,” he said. “What that does is help to protect the rest of that system.”
Crews spent much of the night inspecting all of the underground conduit, vaults, and other electrical distribution equipment to make sure there was no further damage. By 4 a.m. Friday they were able to determine the only damage was at the Virginia and Hale streets intersection. While most power was restored by noon, a few customers in the immediate proximity were expected to remain cutoff until late Friday night.
“Our crews acted very quickly and kept major damage from being done, so that the outage wouldn’t go on for a few days and be a lot more extensive than it actually was,” said Shepelwich.
The cause of the malfunction was still unknown.
“We’ve been removing any kind of damaged materials and cataloging that, inventorying that, and documenting that so we’ll be able to determine what caused it,” Shepelwich said.
While most service was restored, crews planned to continue repair work through the weekend.