Ohio power companies brace for ice in winter storm

COLUMBUS,OHIO (AP) — Ohio utilities beefed up crews and called in reinforcements as a winter storm’s combination of freezing rain and snow cut power to thousands in the state on Wednesday.

The storm spread a glaze of ice and snow from the southern Plains to the East Coast, leaving blackouts, hundreds of school closings and treacherous travel conditions in its wake. At least 19 deaths are blamed on the storm.

The National Weather Service posted storm and ice warnings along a broad swath of states from Texas and Oklahoma through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, all the way into northern New England.

By 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, American Electric Power reported that outages affected about 53,000 of its Ohio customers, primarily in southern and central Ohio. South Central Power Company had more than 10,000 customers without service in Ohio, and close to 14,000 Duke Energy customers were out in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky.

Winter storm warnings were in effect Wednesday for all but five of Ohio’s 88 counties. Sheriffs in at least a dozen southern Ohio counties issued some level of snow emergency, strongly urging drivers to stay off the roads.

Authorities across the state reported a variety of slip-and-slide accidents but no major injuries.

Airlines canceled more than a dozen flights each out of Columbus and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Universities including the main campuses of Ohio State University and Ohio University canceled their Wednesday classes, and dozens of school districts across the state also were closed, including the Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton public schools. Honda Motor Corp. canceled the first shift at its assembly plant in Marysville.

Meteorologists from the weather service forecast that Ohio would be under as much as a foot of snow by Wednesday evening with up to two-tenths of an inch of ice added to the mix in central and southern Ohio.

Ohio’s power companies heeded the warning with extra preparations for potential blackouts.

Duke Energy, which serves more than 1.3 million customers in Ohio and northern Kentucky, had more than 440 extra workers en route to the area Tuesday evening from North Carolina and South Carolina, Duke spokeswoman Johnna Reeder said. Another 750 had been requested in mutual assistance from other utilities.

“To be honest, we’re preparing for worst-case scenario but hoping for the best,” she said.

Reeder said as little as a quarter-inch of ice accumulation could take out a distribution line - the kind that line most residential streets - and a half-inch could disrupt a higher-voltage transmission line.

In western Ohio, Dayton Power & Light boosted its overnight crews by one-third to keep open access to substations and respond to any outages, spokeswoman Kelly Millhouse said.

American Electric Power, which has more than 1.4 million Ohio customers, also had extra help on call, spokeswoman Mary Flint said.

This entry was posted on 29. January 2009 at 09:10 and is filed under USA News, News, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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