CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Some West Virginians will spend the weekend without electricity following Thursday’s heavy storms that included wind gusts of up to 60 mph.
Appalachian Power Company spokesman Phil Moye said his company hopes to have at least half of its customers still without service restored by Friday night. He said the rest by Sunday night. Moye said most of the issues were caused by falling trees.
“Areas that had the greatest damage are areas that tend to be rural–where we have a lot of tree exposure–trees falling on lines because of the high wind,” Moye said.
Crews are taking care of outages in their regular service areas and once restoration has been completed they’ll be moved to other areas.
The storm damage to utility’s system was widespread, Moye said.
“It did some damage everywhere. Obviously there were areas where it was worse than others but we did see outages pretty much in every county we serve in West Virginia,” Moye said.
Appalachian Power/Wheeling Power customers in the Ohio (1,700 customers) and Marshall (1,100 customers) counties saw significant damage.
Appalachian Power reported outages impacting more than 13,000 customers at noon Friday. Kanawha County had the most customers without service at more than 3,000.
Mon Power spokesman Jeff Straight told MetroNews the utility is shooting for total restoration in West Virginia by 6 p.m. Saturday. He also noted the widespread nature of the storm.
“Almost all of our shops were affected in one way or another, some hit a little harder than others. The system that came through impacted the entire state,” Straight said.
Mon Power and Potomac Edison crews were able to restore 80 percent of the outages within the first 12 hours after the storm moved thought.
“It’s not an easy fix. They’re doing a good job and we’ll keep working until they get all of the customers restored,” Straight said.
Mon Power reported outages of 3,900 at noon Friday with Mineral, Wetzel and Harrison counties reporting the highest numbers.