Sunday, January 12, 2020:
Situation:
A strong weather system with rain and damaging winds blew across Appalachian Power’s service areas in waves Saturday, from afternoon through the night. By early Sunday morning more than 1200 customers in the Northern Panhandle were without electric service as a result of storm damage. As expected, outages are widespread across much of the company’s service area.
Storm Response Efforts:
Prior to the storm and based on the predicted widespread nature of this storm, we placed all of our storm response employees and contractors on alert and ready to work locally or travel to heavily-damaged areas. This morning we are following through on that plan, keeping crews and contractors in place where needed and shifting workers in areas with fewer outages to more heavily-damaged areas.
Restoration Estimates:
In West Virginia, customers in Ohio and Marshall counties should have service restored by 10 p.m. tonight.
Safety Message:
Wind storms can cause many downed power lines. Customers should treat all downed lines as live power lines and stay away from them. Never touch downed power lines or sparking equipment. Keep children and pets away from fallen lines and anything the lines may touch.
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/outagemap
Next Update: There will likely not be another update for the Northern Panhandle.
