WAYNE COUNTY, W.Va. — Teams were working different quadrants in Wayne County to start the day Friday, what was the ninth day without power for some residents following damaging ice out of repeat rounds of winter weather.
“We’re going out looking for more people who are sustaining themselves in their houses, making sure they’re warm, offering them warming shelters,” said Bill ‘B.J.’ Willis, Wayne County’s 911 director and emergency management coordinator.
Those teams included Wayne County emergency officials and members of the West Virginia National Guard.
As of Friday morning, Appalachian Power was reporting outages to more than 60 percent of the company’s customers in Wayne County, a total of 14,550 locations.
Restoration work was expected to continue into next week.
“We’re going to treat this as though we don’t know when it’s going to be over because we don’t know when it’s going to be over. That’s the bottom line,” Willis said.
In Mason County, Matt Gregg, director of the Mason County Office of Emergency Services, said most of the areas that were previously completely cut off by fallen trees, power lines, poles and other damage had been accessed by Friday morning.
However, “There are a handful of places that it’s only accessible by either four-wheeler, side-by-sides or small four-wheel drives,” Gregg said.
“We have a plan of — we get in, get the trees cut and then we’ll come back (later) and get what’s left alongside the road, on the hillsides, things like that.”
The number of Mason County homes and businesses without power on Friday morning was 2,752 or 18 percent of Appalachian Power’s customers in the county, according to the company.
“They’re fairly confident that, over the next couple of days, they’ll be able to get in, get those roads cleared, get power poles set, get lines back up and power restored to the folks that are without,” Gregg said.
He was asking residents to send pictures of storm damage with times, dates and locations to the Mason County Office of Emergency Services.
The extent of the damage was complicating restoration efforts throughout the storm zone.
“Some of these places where the lines are down, they have to hike into the woods to get to it (the problem),” said Willis in Wayne County.
The first of the winter storms hit on Thursday, Feb. 11 and was followed by heavy ice on Monday, Feb. 15 with additional snow later in the week.
Counties included in Governor Jim Justice’s State of Emergency Declaration were Mason County, Jackson County, Cabell County, Lincoln County, Putnam County and Wayne County.