As weather turned bitterly cold, windy and snowy on Valentine’s Day power outages mounted, leaving more than 12,000 customers without electric service across Appalachian Power’s service area. Employees responded by working through Saturday night and Sunday to restore service.
 

Today many parts of the company's service area are experiencing significant snow accumulation, but the snow is dry and fluffy and is not expected to cause widespread outages. Currently there are around 600 customers in the company's Virginia service area without electric service, and another 300 in West Virginia.

The company plans to continue utilizing locally-available crews and contractors to respond to power outages. If outages in some areas become more than local crews can handle, however, workers will move to assist from other less affected areas within Appalachian Power’s service area.
 

Expected bitter cold temperatures combined with significant snow accumulation could make travel and restoration efforts difficult in instances where outages occur. 
 
Customers should prepare for the possibility of a power outage in extreme weather, using outage safety tips such as those found at appalachianpower.com.

A snapshot view of current outages is available anytime at appalachianpower.com.  Go to the Outages and Problems section of the site and click "View Outage Map," or go to www.AppalachianPower.com/MyOutage. Then, enter your user ID and password.