Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Bluefield, WV

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  • Staff photo by Jon Bolt Restoring power... Pike Electric worker Thomas Harrell uses a saw to clear away tree limbs that fell across a line in Bluefield, Va., Tuesday afternoon.

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February 22, 2012

Thousands of area residents still powerless

KATE COIL Bluefield Daily Telegraph

BLUEFIELD — Thousands of residents across the region are still without power, and officials said some might be going without electricity until midnight Friday.

Phil Moye, a spokesperson for Appalachian Power, crews spent much of Tuesday working on outages impacting thousands of customers.

“Friday is when we expect to have the last customers on, though most customers will be restored before then,” Moye said. “Of course, we can’t say with any degree of certainly when individual customers will be restored. If customers are part of an outage that impacts a large number of customers, they should be back on before Friday. The outages remaining on Friday will be the ones that only impact one, two or three customers or have a tremendous amount of difficult work to get the power back on. It doesn’t mean we are only dealing with the customers in the cities first or customers in certain areas of the county first. If we can get more people on, we will choose to fix that problem before we fix a problem that only has two or three people out.”

According to Moye, some of the biggest power outages occurred in the Clemson Circle and Cornbread Ridge Road areas of Princeton; the Littlesburg Road, Grassy Branch Road and Heatherwood Road areas of Bluefield; in Brushfork; and in the areas around Falls Mills, Va., and Pocahontas, Va.

Moye said more than 1,000 APCO employees and independent contractors are working across the region to restore power. According to Moye, the bulk of outages are still in Mercer County, which was the hardest hit by Sunday’s snowstorm.

“Mercer County has probably half of the outages that are still out there and the bulk of the crews are out there,” Moye said. “We have about 750 additional crew members we have brought into this area to help get power restored. I would say we easily have more than 1,000 working on the restoration effort in both states. We have a mix of contractors we have brought in from outside to help out.”

Moye said most of the power outages are not only widespread but many are in remote locations, making it hard for crews to bring in the equipment necessary for restoring power.

“The outages are very spread out,” Moye said. “They tend to be in areas that are outside city limits, and because of that, the biggest problem we’ve had is downed trees. We presently have crews working in Brushfork, Rocky Gap, Athens, the Pisgah Road area and spread throughout the county.”

According to Moye, APCO crews are reinstalling many power poles the old-fashioned way because they cannot get their trucks and other equipment into these remote locations.

“A lot of it is in the more remote area that it is harder for us to get crews to,” he said. “In Rocky Gap, we are actually going to have to dig a hole and handset a pole because we can’t get a truck up there. In Mercer County, we had about 250 places where it was just one thing that was causing a major outage. Sometimes, fixing an outage is something as easy as taking a tree off the line or something has difficult as hand placing a pole and hand stringing the electric wires. This isn’t the case everywhere, but there are certainly cases where we have to go out where we can’t use a truck. Some of the jobs we go out on are difficult in terms of how much work has to be done.”

Moye said downed trees are causing a majority of the problem.

“People in more rural areas are affected more by something like this because there simply are more trees between the substation and someone’s home,” he said. “If you live in the city, you usually don’t have many trees and are closer to the substation. It’s a different situation than living in the country where you have a lot of tree exposure. With this snowstorm, the snow falling on trees, particularly evergreens, was the problem for us. Most of the problems are where the trees are.”

Moye said APCO understands the frustrations of the thousands in the two Virginias still without power.

Power was restored to all customers in McDowell County as of 4 p.m. Tuesday while residents in Buchanan County had their power restored by 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. Power was also restored to customers in Bland County as of 9 p.m. Tuesday evening.

According to APCO, more than 3,800 customers in Mercer County, 750 customers in Tazewell County, 350 in Monroe County and 190 in Giles County were still without power at 9 p.m. Tuesday.

— Contact Kate Coil at kcoil@bdtonline.com

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