Power outages hit same areas for second day

More than 13,600 AEP Ohio customers lost power for more than four hours Friday, basically in the same Reynoldsburg and surrounding areas that lost power Thursday.

Outages on both days occurred between 3 and 3:30 p.m. AEP’s outage website showed power was restored shortly before 7:30 p.m. Friday for all but a handful of customers. Those few customers without electricity were expected to have it restored by 11:30 p.m., the utility estimated.

AEP Ohio investigators believe the same issue caused the Friday outage that caused the Thursday outage that affected about 16,000 customers: an underground line at the same substation, spokesman Scott Fuller said.

Crews worked Thursday on the older equipment blamed for the outage, he said. The utility is continuing to investigate, and could not immediately clarify if the equipment blamed for Thursday’s outage had been replaced or repaired before the Friday issue.

Fuller said both the Thursday and Friday outages were not the result of “brownouts” caused by hot afternoon temperatures reaching their peak and demand on the system from air conditioners and fans atop regular usage.

“We understand they are frustrated,” Fuller said of affected customers.

The utility originally estimated on its outage website that power would be restored by 7:30 p.m. Friday. Later, the utility tweeted and changed its website estimate to indicate power would be restored about 5:30 p.m.

When the 5:30 p.m. estimate went by and power was still out, AEP extended the estimate for power restoration back to 6:15 p.m. At 6:20 p.m., power was still out and the website stopped giving an estimate. Instead, “assessing condition” was listed under estimated restoration on the outage map until the outage was shown as resolved.

Meanwhile, a couple hundred AEP Ohio employees who have been working to help restore power on Florida’s East Coast the past two weeks following Hurricane Irma left today to return to Ohio.