BECKLEY, W.Va. — The Flat Top region of Raleigh County has been the epicenter of damage from last week’s ice storm that has caused some residents in southern West Virginia to be without electrical service for parts of five days.
“It’s just the area where the ice accumulation was heavy enough to bring down trees and bring down the poles and that’s really what we’ve struggled with,” Appalachian Power Company spokesman Phil Moye said Monday. “We’ve just had pole after pole that either snapped halfway up or brought all the way down.”
There were still 2,000 customers without service early Monday afternoon. Most were in Raleigh (1,421) and Mercer (450) counties. Appalachian Power hoped to have all service restored by Monday night.
The ice was still on the trees some 48 hours after the storm in the Cherry Creek/Flat Top area, causing trees to continue to break, according to Moye.
“If you drove around in Beckley or Princeton you wouldn’t see any of that but when you come into the area where the ice is thick enough, even a day or two after the storm, the ice was still laying on the trees and the longer it laid there the more likely it was that something was going to break,” Moye said.
Dozens of poles have had to be replaced along with thousands of feet of wire.
“The trees were falling and it was just breaking entire poles and several spans of wire,” Moye said. “The amount of physical work involved in getting that repaired is tremendously higher than in a normal type of storm.”
Moye said ice storms can cause the worst damage.
“Ice storms, I think, are just one of the most crippling things that you can have for electric infrastructure because it just brings down everything,” he said.