CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Crews from Appalachian Power spent much of Monday working to restore power outages scattered across a wide area of the company’s service territory. Storms along the I-64 Corridor from Huntington to Charleston Sunday afternoon created a lot of damage and left power crews trying to keep up.
“We saw a number of clusters of storms and in those there was a lot of tree damage from high winds,” said Phil Moye, Appalachian Power Spokesman. “That’s what we’re mostly repairing, trees falling onto lines.”
The wind was so intense it even dropped a high power transmission line which crossed I-64 between Institute and Cross Lanes. Nobody saw that coming according to Moye.
“That’s a very rare thing to happen,” he said. “I guess that’s emblematic of the problems we had because we had a lot of lines down.”
The storms came suddenly after a day of 90 plus degree heat with high humidity. Such storms are not uncommon for a summer afternoon and the pattern seems to be continuing for several days to come. Line crews are on standby according to Moye as more damage is expected.
“We’ve been through spells like this and we are on alert for it. We know we’re going to get some more,” said Moye. “When we see clusters of storms, we make sure our folks know they may well be called out to restore power and if an area gets hit particularly bad we want people to be able to move to areas where the damage is.”
Appalachian Power hoped to have power restored as quickly as possible, especially with more weather expected which could add substantially to the workload.