The situation in the northern and eastern part of the state — FirstEnergy territory — is not quite as bad following Friday's storm, power restoration-wise, as it might have seemed Sunday morning.
Subsidiary Mon Power tweeted on July 1, first, that it had 50-plus transmission facilities damaged, with a photo of a mangled transmission tower, the top at the ground.
A bit later came the tweet that the company has to resolve transmission and substation facilities first before anything else — then restore power to hospitals and other emergency facilities, then to larger communities, and on down the line.
Anyone who saw those tweets come through had to wonder: How many of those big towers can possibly be available on short notice? And how long will it take to replace 50 of them?
While the tweets were accurate, the situation is nowhere near as dire as that interpretation, according to Mon Power spokesman Todd Meyers.
"Those winds approached 90 miles per hour at Parkersburg — that's where things were the worst," Meyers said. "They took three of those lattice steel towers and crumpled them over."
Those towers support a 500-kilovolt line that parallels U.S. Route 50 between the Harrison power station and Parkersburg. It doesn't serve local customers, Meyers said, but serves the larger grid, with connections to the west, the north and the northeast.
Crews are replacing those towers now with temporary V-shaped structures that stack and are supported by guy wires and are robust enough to get the system through to the shoulder season — the spring and fall lower-demand seasons — when lines can be out of service for maintenance.
The company did put out a news release saying there were 50 transmission lines and 70 substations out of service, he said, but those span a variety of infrastructure and they're not "completely obliterated."
A lot of the damage is to 138-kV lines, regional transmission that takes power across mountains on wooden poles to local substations.
"We have to get up in the air with helicopters — we've had six of them up pretty much non-stop during daylight hours starting Saturday — they fly above the wire looking for things like trees lying on the line, broken cross arms, broken components," he said. "We've found structures that are damaged, and we're able to get forest crews out to clean up the trees and we get these other types of transmission crews out there, linemen who specialized in transmission."
The 70 out-of-service substations are typically not heavily damaged but simply de-energized because these feeder lines are de-energized, he said.
As of about noon on Monday, FirstEnergy had reduced the count of customers without power from 280,000 to 160,000 in its Mon Power service territory and from 84,000 to 29,000 in Potomac Edison.
The hope has been that fixing the regional transmission lines would take care of most of the problems, Meyers said.
"But as we knew already, we're finding that there's a lot of tree damage to the underlying, less robust distribution network" — that's the network that takes electricity from substations to communities — so there's a lot of damage there, too."
Storms typically affect the distribution network only but, because this storm affected both distribution and transmission, it's particularly challenging.
"Mon Power itself doesn't have enough assets — there's not a utility that does — sitting in a warehouse for these big storms that come along rarely, so we've been reaching out for help," he said.
As FirstEnergy subsidiaries in Ohio and Pennsylvania have taken care of problems in their territories, they've begun to pitch in in West Virginia.
"We have crews from West Penn power, Toledo Edison, Ohio Edison will be coming, Jersey Central Power and Light — and that's only fitting because we sent crews there after the October snowstorm," he said.
"And we've also reached out beyond the company to a lot of contracted crews, so we do have some people coming from Michigan area, New York, Kentucky, Florida," he said.
The current level is about 400 linemen and rising, as well as about 225 hazard responders who head straight to any downed wire and, if it's hot, stay with it until a crew arrives to repair it or make it safe for later repair.
Although Mon Power may not keep a large store of equipment like major towers and substation components on hand, it is able to draw from parts of FirstEnergy's 10-utility system that weren't hit as hard.
"There are things outside Reading, Pa., things near Connellsville, Pa., things in Ohio, so there are supplies in yards that aren't too far away," Meyers said.
"They're beginning to move big poles in, truck things in from as much as five hours away, and we're establishing staging areas near Parkersburg, Lewisburg, Gassaway and Elkins," he said.
Crews will be based out of these staging areas for everything from receiving daily assignments, refueling vehicles and accessing equipment to sleeping and eating.
Phil Moye, a spokesman for Appalachian Power, the other major
electric utility in the state, said most of the problems in that company's service
area came from downed transmission lines. Transmission lines carry electricity from
power plant to substations, after which power is carried on distribution lines to
customers.
Nothing on the Appalachian Power system above a 138-kilovolt
line was affected, Moye said.
The company lost service at more than 50 substations when the
transmission lines feeding them went off line, Moye said.
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