Situation
The windstorm that crossed Appalachian Power’s service territory Saturday afternoon left downed trees and power lines in its wake, and knocked out power to more than 85,000 customers. Within 24 hours of the outage peak, crews have restored service to more than 80 percent of those customers.
Outages
- Of the 16,400 customers currently without power, 11,800 are in West Virginia, 4,400 are in Virginia and around 200 are in Tennessee.
Storm Response Efforts
- More than 2,600 storm response workers, including line workers, assessors and forestry crews, are working 16-hour shifts to restore electric service as safely and as quickly as they can. The storm response team includes 600 line workers outside of the company’s service area, from as far away as Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
- So far, crews have identified more than 650 spans of downed wire and nearly 100 broken or damaged poles. Customer operations center workers have handled nearly 80,000 customer calls about outages.
Restoration Estimates
- In Virginia and Tennessee, service will be restored by tonight for most customers in Bland, Floyd, Giles, Patrick, Russell, Tazewell and Wythe counties, and by Monday night for customers in other, more heavily damaged parts of Virginia and Tennessee.
- In West Virginia, service will be restored by tonight for most customers in Jackson, Marshall, Mason, Monroe and Ohio counties, and by Monday night for most customers in Cabell, Lincoln, McDowell, Mercer, Nicholas, Putnam, Wayne and Wyoming counties. The restoration effort is expected to be complete by Tuesday night for the most heavily-damaged areas of West Virginia, which include parts of Boone, Clay, Fayette, Kanawha, Logan, Mingo, Raleigh and Roane counties.
- Most customers currently without service will have power restored before the stated times. Customers are encouraged to view the company’s outage map or sign up for outage alerts for information on their specific outage.
Weather
- Weather is expected to be favorable throughout the remainder of the service restoration effort.
Safety Message
- All downed lines are dangerous — they carry an electric current that can cause serious or even fatal injuries. Stay away to stay alive. If you encounter a fallen wire, keep yourself and others away from it and anything it may be touching, and call 911 and Appalachian Power at 1-800-956-4237 immediately.
- If you use a portable or RV generator, do not plug the generator into your circuit box.
- Additional safety tips are posted at https://www.appalachianpower.com/outages/faq/OutageSafetyTips.aspx.
For More Information
Customers can get specific information about the outages affecting their accounts via text message and/or email by subscribing to Appalachian Power outage alerts. To sign up, please visit www.appalachianpower.com/alerts.
A snapshot view of current outages is available anytime at www.appalachianpower.com. Go to the Outages and Problems section of the homepage and click “View Outage Map.”
