Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 16, 1994 TAG: 9403040004
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, that depends. The three utility companies in the New River Valley - Radford Electric Department, Virginia Tech Electric Service and Appalachian Power Co. - have problems of a different scale.
Apco, by far the largest utility, still had 2,450 customers in Pulaski, 350 in Giles and 4,300 in Montgomery and Floyd counties without electricity Tuesday.
Spokeswoman Glenda Wohlford said it could be the weekend before all homes have heat and light.
Apco serves more than 100,000 customers in Pulaski Montgomery, Floyd, Giles, Carroll, Wythe, Grayson and Bland counties in this division.
The most serious problems included the area from Christiansburg's town limits to Pilot, Ironto, Childress and parts of McCoy. Wohlford said that in Montgomery and Floyd, downed service lines to individual homes accounted for half of the outages.
Apco has 846 crew members working, 638 of them borrowed from other districts and private companies. "The number of people we're getting in here continues to go up," she said, but added that didn't mean power restoration would go any faster. The bulk of repairs up until now have put hundreds of homes back on line, but repairing one house's line often takes just as long with much less impact.
Virginia Tech's campus never lost power, as the distribution lines are underground. Of the 6,000 customers in the town served by the Tech utility, 4,500 lost power. The 200 that remained without electricity Tuesday have downed lines to individual houses.
Spencer Hall, assistant vice president for facilities, said he hoped everyone would be restored by 5 p.m. today.
Hall said the company would drive through neighborhoods looking for dark houses Tuesday night, as some residents never notified the company that their service lines were down.
Radford Electric Department also had 200 customers without power Tuesday. Radford serves 7,000 customers in the city; 5,000 lost power during the storm. That utility, too, hoped to all but finish today.
How bad was it? Radford said this was the longest its customers had ever gone without power.
Hall with Virginia Tech said the last comparable ice storm was in 1979, but "This is the worst storm we've had that we can remember." He said Hurricane Hugo disrupted power for only two days, and this had been six for some residents.
But Apco said this storm, while more serious than the Blizzard of '93, which took four days to restore power, still had not bested Hugo. That took eight days to get back to normal.
On other weather fronts: the good news is Blacksburg residents can be assured that the water is safe, and there never was contamination.
The bad news is Blacksburg officials now believe it will take two months to clean up all the branches from curbsides where homeowners are being asked to pile their brush.
The Montgomery County Board of Supervisors, meanwhile, backed away Monday from a proposal to waive fees at the county landfill for storm debris.
The current dumping fee is $38 per ton for brush and debris, whether hauled to the landfill by a local resident in a pickup truck or by a garbage truck.
Instead, the supervisors decided to keep track of landfill users between Feb. 11 and March 18 and reimburse them if federal or state disaster aid becomes available.
\ Information for this story was also contributed by Brian Kelley.
by CNB