F
rom Appalachian Power: While we expect to reduce outage numbers significantly through tonight, we anticipate that many customers will not have service restored until late Thanksgiving night. Complete restoration, especially in remote areas or in outages cases that affect small numbers of customers, is likely to persist through Friday. Heavy, wet snow fell across parts of Appalachian Power’s southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia service areas Wednesday, damaging electric facilities and leaving more than 22,000 customers without electric service.
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In advance of the storm, Appalachian Power placed extra resources in areas where damage was expected. Damage from the heavy snow was greater than anticipated, however, and the company is bringing even more resources into the affected areas. Crews from Charleston and Huntington in West Virginia, and from Roanoke and Lynchburg in Virginia, are traveling to join the restoration effort. Employees are mindful that the damage they are working to repair came just hours before Thanksgiving Day, a time when families have made plans to come together. Every effort is being made to restore service as soon as possible. This evening and into tomorrow morning, damage assessment specialists will continue to patrol lines and determine resources needed to make repairs. At the same time, crews are working on outage cases that affect large numbers of customers. Until more complete damage assessment is available, we cannot provide an accurate overall restoration time.
