AEP President: Ohio storm surpassed Ike damage

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — The storms that left hun­dreds of thou­sands of Ohio res­i­dents with­out power over the past week have far sur­passed the dam­age caused by the rem­nants of Hur­ri­cane Ike four years ago, the pres­i­dent of Amer­i­can Elec­tric Power of Ohio said Thursday.

His com­ments were under­scored by a third round of thun­der­storms that knocked power out to 21,000 cen­tral Ohio cus­tomers, some of whom had pre­vi­ously lost power and had it restored.

The recent storms — which included a sys­tem that swept through last Fri­day, a sec­ond strong storm Sun­day after­noon and an overnight storm early Thurs­day — caused more out­ages and dam­aged more elec­tri­cal poles and trans­mis­sion lines than Ike did in Sep­tem­ber 2008, said AEP-Ohio pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer Pablo Vegas.

Restor­ing power this time is more com­pli­cated because of the ongo­ing heat wave with tem­per­a­tures hit­ting 100 degrees, com­pared with rel­a­tively mild tem­per­a­tures in the 70s after Hur­ri­cane Ike, Vegas said. Three util­ity work­ers have already been hos­pi­tal­ized for heat exhaus­tion, he said.

“By all mea­sure this is a more com­pli­cated restora­tion effort,” Vegas said.

About 143,000 cus­tomers were with­out power statewide Thurs­day, almost all of them AEP-Ohio cus­tomers and most in the Newark area in cen­tral Ohio and Athens area in south­east Ohio. Duke Energy and Day­ton Power & Light were down to just a hand­ful of outages.

Vegas likened the repair efforts to a tree, not­ing that the system’s trunk and branches — large cir­cuits affect­ing thou­sands of cus­tomers — have now been fixed. That leaves the smaller cir­cuits, the branches and twigs, which still require a lot of effort to repair but which affect far fewer customers.

“Where we might have got­ten 5,000 cus­tomers on at a time when we did that, we’re get­ting to a stage where it’s get­ting 50 or 100 cus­tomers at a time,” Vegas said. “It takes the same level of effort but there’s a lot less cus­tomers that ben­e­fit from that.”

Vegas said the util­ity began an aggres­sive tree-trimming pro­gram in 2008 and has applied in its lat­est rate pro­posal to con­tinue it. But that effort only involves trees in the utility’s right-of-way and can’t do any­thing about trees blown onto lines from out­side those right-of-way areas.

The overnight storm in Colum­bus downed power lines along Inter­state 670, tem­porar­ily shut­ting down a sec­tion of the high­way that links down­town Colum­bus with the city’s main airport.

The road­way on the city’s east side closed for sev­eral hours Thurs­day but reopened by morn­ing rush hour. Police cars had blocked ramps to the high­way while util­ity crews cleared the downed lines.

Mean­while, Amer­i­can Elec­tric Power had about 143,000 cus­tomers with­out elec­tric­ity, mostly in cen­tral and south­east Ohio. Many of those peo­ple have been with­out power since Fri­day, when thun­der­storms and high winds knocked out elec­tric­ity for roughly a mil­lion Ohio homes and businesses.

Ohioans were brac­ing for triple-digit tem­per­a­tures on Thurs­day, with more storms fore­cast for Athens, Chill­i­cothe and Newark.

Many Ohioans were ditch­ing out­door activ­i­ties at all costs because of the heat, but that wasn’t an option for peo­ple expected to turn out for Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s three-city tour across north­ern Ohio on Thurs­day, with a fourth stop in the Youngstown area sched­uled Friday.

Tracey King didn’t let the heat stop her from get­ting a glimpse of Obama’s motor­cade Thurs­day, not when he was speak­ing less than a mile from her house in Maumee. Tem­per­a­tures there topped 90 degrees mid-afternoon with 100 degrees predicted.

Still, King took pre­cau­tions, wear­ing a straw hat and a cold ban­danna around her neck.

“It’s too close to miss,” she said while stand­ing under a shade tree with a cou­ple dozen onlookers.

Posted by AP News on Jul 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.