ROANOKE, Va. – When back-to-back rounds of severe weather swept across Virginia and West Virginia beginning Monday, Aug. 10, Appalachian Power Company (APCo) crews faced a familiar challenge: widespread outages, damaged infrastructure and rapidly changing conditions.
What made this response different was how quickly crews were able to recover.
Since storm response efforts began late Monday, APCo crews restored electric service to approximately 79,000 customers across more than 1,500 outage locations following a series of storms that brought damaging winds, heavy rain, saturated ground conditions and extensive tree-related damage.
Customer outages peaked at approximately 28,000 at 5 p.m. Monday, and while crews made major progress, a second round of storms on Tuesday caused additional damage. Despite those setbacks, the company restored service to the overwhelming majority of affected customers within hours.
The company's response effort included thousands of lineworkers, forestry personnel, contractors and support employees working around the clock to assess damage, replace broken equipment, clear debris and rebuild portions of the electric system damaged by the storms’ high winds and torrential rain fall. Restoration work included replacing at least 50 broken poles and repairing more than 100 spans of damaged power lines.
APCo’s Storm Response Team said the successful response was years in the making.
"We've worked hard over the years to strengthen our storm response capabilities through planning, training, storm simulations and continuous improvement after every major weather event," said Jason Baker, vice president of distribution operations. "Every storm teaches us something. We've taken those lessons and applied them to how we prepare, how we mobilize field personnel and how we respond. That preparation helped our crews safely restore power to customers as quickly as possible during this event."
The company began preparing before the storms arrived, positioning personnel and securing mutual assistance resources from neighboring states. As conditions worsened, crews from Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee joined APCo employees in the restoration effort, helping accelerate repairs and reduce outage durations for customers.
Company leaders credit lessons learned from previous major weather events and annual storm exercises for improving restoration efficiency. Those efforts have refined everything from crew deployment strategies and damage assessment processes to logistics coordination and communication during large-scale restoration events.
Throughout the response, restoration efforts followed APCo’s established storm restoration process. Crews first restored power to critical facilities supporting public health and safety, including hospitals, 911 centers and water treatment facilities. Workers then focused on repairs that restored service to the greatest number of customers before addressing smaller outage pockets and individual service issues.
Crews worked around difficult conditions that included wind gusts of up to 80 mph, flash flooding, blocked roads, saturated ground and continuing weather threats that complicated restoration work and limited access to damaged infrastructure.
The most heavily impacted areas included portions of Charleston, Hamlin and Wayne in West Virginia, as well as Lynchburg, Roanoke and Clintwood in Virginia. Despite repeated storm impacts, workers continued restoration efforts around the clock until service was returned to all affected customers.
As restoration concludes, APCo is continuing to evaluate the response and identify additional opportunities to improve future storm recovery efforts.