CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Over 16,000 Appalachian Power Company customers in West Virginia are without power due to flash flooding and the winter storm that blew through the state this past weekend.

Photo: Appalachian Power’s Facebook

AEP spokesperson Debby Pannell says that their main challenge has been flooding, which has restricted access to some areas.

“Many of our neighbors and communities that we serve, roads are inaccessible,” Pannell said. “And we are monitoring them and just waiting for water to recede so we can get in there to make repairs.”

Crews are having to battle the floods in Boone, Logan and Mingo counties because the water levels still haven’t gone down. They are having to use drones in order to see the damages and the necessary repairs that need to be done before they enter the areas.

She says that when crews are tackling power outages of this magnitude, there are four stages. She said that they want to restore power to essential public safety facilities, like hospitals first, then they will move onto larger pockets of customers to get power back to a larger group of customers, then smaller pockets of customers and finally to individual customers and businesses.

Pannell said that flooding can cause different issues that crews could face.

“A lot of times with flooding what you see it will uproot trees and trees will take down their power lines, and when that happens, sometimes it’s just a line repair, but other times it will pull the pole down too or break the top of the pole off or the cross arm,” Pannell said.

Pannell said that while flooding has posed a problem, the winter weather storm also caused some issues for power crews.

Photo: Appalachian Power’s Facebook

“We had a lot of problems with ice earlier (Monday morning) and then of course just the ground being so saturated has been so difficult and has caused a lot of additional outages,” she said.

Currently AEP is anticipating an 11 p.m. restoration for several counties, spanning throughout this week.

Pannell said that this estimated time is when they expect to have at least 95% of customers in an area restored to full power.

“And that is when we anticipate having the majority of our customers restored in that area, “she said. “Of course, customers will continue to be restored throughout that period of time, but that’s just when we anticipate the majority will be back online.”

Pannell encourages customers to go to AEP’s website to either report an outage or keep track of the restoration times for your area.

For more information you can go to AEP’s website here.

Photos: Appalachian Power’s Facebook