Power for some may be out until Sunday
West Penn Power officials reported Friday that because many substations are down, some customers' power may not be restored until Sunday.
Todd Meyers, West Penn Power spokesman, said thousands of homes and businesses are without power after Winter Storm Avery hit areas of Butler and Armstrong counties particularly hard.
He said West Penn Power crews from surrounding areas not as hard hit by the storm were on their way Friday morning to help get power back up and running.
“Our guys are telling us that if you drew a triangle from Butler to Kittanning to the New Kensington area, that's where we got most of our damage,” Meyers said.
He said 5,000 customers were out at 9 p.m. Thursday night.
“The worst, unfortunately, was yet to come,” Meyers said.
More than 37,000, or one in three customers, were affected in that area as of the noon hour Friday, and Meyers did not expect many more outages to be reported after that.
He explained that a combination of 1/10 inch of ice followed by wet snow, leaves remaining on trees that collected the heavy precipitation, wet ground from the rain that preceded the storm, and wind gusts overnight Thursday into Friday morning caused hundreds of trees and limbs to fall and take out power lines.
Crews' initial objective, Meyers said, is to repair the high-voltage lines that enter substations, where lower voltage lines originate that feed homes and businesses.
He said 13 or 14 of the large lines that come into the company's various substations fell, knocking the substations offline.
“Thousands and thousands of customers are affected by these distribution substations waiting to be energized,” Meyers said, “so the focus right now is getting those substations back up online.”
The crews's next priority, Meyers said, will be repairing the supply lines that power homes and business. The final fixes will be broken and downed lines that go from those lines into customers' homes.
Meyers said First Energy owns 10 electric companies in the region, but Butler County was “ground zero” for the company regarding Winter Storm Avery.
“(Surrounding areas) were not impacted as hard,” Meyers said. “As soon as (line crews) have their areas completed, they'll be on the road to help here.”
He named State College, Chambersburg and Greensburg as areas from which West Penn Power crews will be dispatched to help out in the Butler and Kittanning areas.
He said crews are working 16-hour shifts with eight hours off, 24 hours per day, including on the weekend.
Ken Maleski, spokesman for Central Electric Cooperative in Parker, said as of the noon hour Friday, 9,313 of the cooperative's 9,551 Butler County customers were without power due to the storm.
“We had 1,500 out in 2017 from Hurricane Ike, but this is probably our largest outage in our history of 81 years,” Maleski said.
Adding to the problem is the fact that many of the nine CEC substations that are down are serviced by other power suppliers, and until those suppliers re-energize the substations, there is no way of knowing when the cooperative's customers will have their power restored.
“Once the substations are back, we will be better able to assess the damage,” Maleski said.
He said crews are working to repair supply lines that feed the lines into customers' homes and businesses as they wait for the substations to be brought back online.
“(Crews) are doing what they can to fix those known problems now,” Maleski said.
He cautioned customers to avoid removing or cutting trees laying on power lines, as the lines may still have energy even though the customer's power is out.
Central Electric issued an update on the power situation Friday evening saying that is was waiting on confirmation from West Penn Power for the nine substations. At the time, Central Electric crews were still trying to restore power for a total of 16,300 customers in seven counties. The company serves 25,000 customers total, the news release stated.
The hardest-hit counties served by Central Electric, Maleski said, are Butler, Venango and Armstrong, in that order.
Information on the widespread outage is available at www.firstenergycorp.com for West Penn Power customers and www.central.coop for Central Electric Cooperative customers.
