APCO crews push to meet Sunday’s timeline

BLUEFIELD — Power crews continued working Friday to restore power in West Virginia and Virginia while residents in both states kept waiting for their turn to see the lights come on.

Phil Moye, a spokesperson with Appalachian Power, said the initial storm on June 29 led to 566,000 power outages in West Virginia with an additional 6,000 caused as the result of storms on July 3. Storms that hit the region Thursday evening led to 40,000 new outages across APCO’s service territory.

“Thursday’s storms did set us back and it was the second time in this restoration effort we’ve had a storm impact around 30,000 customers,” Moye said. “That made 60,000 customers on top of the 500,000 we already had to restore. It makes it tougher to meet that Sunday night time frame. We do have a lot of resources in here and we are hoping to have good weather this weekend to help us restore electricity. We are aiming to hit that Sunday night timeline. We may not completely get there, but that is still our goal.”

As of Friday evening, APCO was reporting the following numbers of people still without power: 4,595 customers in Mercer County; 1,527 in McDowell County; 691 in Monroe County; 671 in Tazewell County; 1,207 in Buchanan County; and 691 in Giles County.

Since the initial storms last week, APCO reported service has been restored to 63 percent of customers impacted by original outages in West Virginia and 75 percent of customers impacted by the original outages in Virginia.

Moye said the areas with larger outages are now mainly relegated to more rural areas.

“Areas that are worse off tend to be more rural areas that are heavily forested since there is more tree exposure there,” he said. “One of the larger outages we have is a 300-customer outage in the Jenkinjones area. We also have a 200-customer outage and another 185-customer outage in the Matoaka area. We also have a large outage in the Rock area as well as Old Ingleside Road in Princeton that have about 100 customers out. In Paynesville on Baker’s Ridge we have another 100-customer outage and another in Jolo with 149 customers.”

Late Friday evening, the McDowell County Office of Emergency Services issued a request for all county residents that have had a vehicle or structure damaged by the severe storm that struck June 29, to call (304) 436-2008 between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., so that a preliminary assessment of damage can be compiled for McDowell County, according to county OES spokesman John Sidote.

Tim Crofton, chief executive officer of the Tug River Health Association, Inc., said medical centers run by the organization across McDowell County have resorted to seeing patients by flashlight due to power outages.

“We have been open during all of the storm activity,” Crofton said. “In some places, we have had water and no power and in others we had power and no water. We’ve been seeing some patients by flashlight and offering water to people. We take a position that when there is something like this going on that this is the time people need us the most. We have remained open in case there is a medical problem someone can come in so a physician or nurse practitioner can see a patient.”

Crofton said all of the Tug River clinics in the county have been impacted in some way or another by the storms.

“All of our areas have been pretty much equally impacted,” Crofton said. “Our Northfork center had a lot of outages as did the pediatric center in Pineville. There is a lot of storm damage in those places and some people couldn’t get out. The water availability is the biggest problem. Without lights, you can always use flashlights but water is harder to deal with. We are prepared for that, but it is still an issue.”

In addition to losing electricity and water, Crofton said clinics have been dealing with communication problems.

“Communication has been a challenge,” he said. “With the radio station no longer in existence in McDowell County, we haven’t figured out how to communicate a lot of what is going on to the area. When the power goes off down here, the phones go off as well. It makes it hard to communicate that we are here and open for business. Water is also a significant issue in the county, so we have bottled water at each of the sites. We have an interest in working with some of our colleagues in acquiring a generator or two to keep things going. We are taking things like that into consideration as we plan for the future.”

According to Moye, APCO is also looking into ways to make restoration efforts more efficient. The company plans to look into current practices for trimming trees in right-of-ways after restoration efforts are complete.

“There are areas where we can do better with tree trimming,” Moye said. “There are areas where it is more challenging to do tree trimming, especially when there are many trees out of our right-of-way area. With this outage, the majority of the trees that fell onto lines were not in the right-of-way area, so there was nothing we could have done. I think in the aftermath of this storm we will be looking at right-of-way practices and I think we will be taking a look at the scale of this outage, such as setting up cots for 200 workers at the Brushfork Armory. We will be looking at logistics. Anytime we have a storm, especially a major storm like this, we will look back to see if there is anything we change or anything we can do to aid restoration efforts or minimize damage.”

Now many of southern West Virginia’s residents are wondering whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will provide assistance.

After the June 29 storms that swept across the state, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin made a request at 3 a.m. on June 30 to FEMA for a preliminary assessment, said Kimberly Osborne, press secretary. That request was granted by 1 p.m. that day.

The state is now focusing on responding to the storm’s destruction and helping residents, Osborne said. As of Friday, more than 200,000 people were still without power.

FEMA teams are expected to arrive early next week and begin assessing the situation to see if the state qualifies for assistance.

“FEMA has scheduled teams to conduct that work, but we need to be sure that work does not interfere with the response,” Osborne said. “We don’t want the assessments to slow down the response.”

— Contact Kate Coil at

kcoil@bdtonline.com

Senior Reporter Greg Jordan contributed to this story.

Local News

Search Results

Related Photos

Discussion

APCO crews push to meet Sunday’s timeline

Site Map

Contact Us