CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Repair crews from Appalachian Power spent much of Friday pulling burned out circuits, wiring, and other parts of a power vault from a manhole in Virginia Street in downtown Charleston Friday. The vault caught fire Thursday evening and darkened several blocks of the downtown for the night.
John Shepelwich, with Appalachian Power says most of those outages were deliberate.
“When we were made aware of it, our protocol calls for isolating it and essentially shutdown the rest of the underground network in that circuit,” he said. “What that does is help to protect the rest of that system.”
Crews spent much of the night inspecting all of the underground conduit, vaults, and other electrical distribution equipment to make sure there was no further damage. By 4 a.m. Friday they were able to determine the only damage was at the Virginia and Hale Street Intersection. Power started coming back on as the day started and by noon most of those impacted were back in service. A few will remain out of power in the immediate proximity of the fire until late tonight.
“Our crews acted very quickly and kept major damage from being done, so that the outage wouldn’t go on for a few days and be a lot more extensive than it actually was,” said Shepelwich.
The cause of the malfunction is still unknown.
“We’ve been removing any kind of damaged materials and cataloging that, inventorying that, and documenting that so we’ll be able to determine what caused it,” Shepelwich said.
While most service is restored, crews will continue to work on repairing the underground vault through the weekend.