CHARLESTON, W.Va. — With Winter Storm Jonas predicted to hit southern West Virginia Friday morning, Appalachian Power has contingency plans in place for its service area in the event of outages.
Spokesman Phil Moye said the heavy, wet snow that’s predicted could cause the company some issues.
“The word snow on its own is not terribly bad, but when you put heavy and wet in front of it, that’s the type of thing that gives us problems. Certainly that’s what we’re preparing for,” said Moye.
He said that type of snow can snap branches on trees, which wreak havoc on power lines.
“We’ve brought in an additional 850 workers from outside our service territory,” Moye said. “750 line mechanics and another 100 damage assessment specialists. They’re scattered all throughout our service territory, from here down to Beckley and Bluefield, even over in Roanoke.”
He said that workers would work to fix any outages as soon as it was safe and prudent to do so.
“If you’re out in an area (where trees are falling), as a line mechanic, you’re up on a pole trying to repair a line and trees are snapping around you,” he explained. “It really becomes a safety issue. As soon as it’s safe for our workers to get in there, we’ll get in there.”
The company would try to keep residents informed in the event of any outages, Moye said.
“If it becomes a multi-day event, we put what’s called a backdrop time, which is a time that we feel we’re going to have everybody or mostly everybody back in service,” he explained. “Then as we know more specific information about a specific outage, we populate that information and send (text updates).
The storm is expected to begin early Friday morning and go into Saturday in most parts of the state.