Joe Hamrock, president of American Electric Power, answered more questions on Thursday related to the power outages still affecting thousands of central Ohioans.
Below is a transcript of the Hamrock's interview. To watch the segment, click here.
Question: What's the latest on getting power back to everybody?
Hamrock: We are making great progress. In the last couple of days we've got 3,000 folks working in the field to restore service and clear trees. As we speak, I'm in the dispatch center, and the update is at this point is 182,000 still out from the peak of close to 700,000 on Sunday. In central Ohio we are just under 100,000. We are at 99,000 at this time and continuing to make progress with lots more resources coming into central Ohio as we clean up the disaster across the rest of the state.
Question: We've heard a lot of complaints from folks who had power restored and lost it again. How's that happening?
Hamrock: We've heard that, too. The way we restore power is to try and bring back the largest blocks of customers first and the damage associated with those customers. Often when we do that it reveals other problems on the circuit and for safety reasons safety is our highest priority we'll have to then shut off the circuit to make sure we have a safe situation and clear the lines for additional tree-clearing or additional damage repairs. Many customers have asked that question: Why am I seeing my lights go back on then off? It happened at my house, it happens to many different people. It's a very common part of the safety feature built in to our restoration process.
Question: With the repair crews working 16-hour days, that gets expensive for your company. In the past customers have seen rate hikes to cover those increased costs. Will that happen this time, too? And if so, how much will customers have to pay?
Hamrock: Often with a major ice storm or a major event, we collect that cost and would put together a special surcharge to recover that (cost). We're not yet thinking about that. We're very focused on getting customers back on and making sure that this is done safely and effectively. We'll worry about that later. We don't have an estimate of the cost of this, nor have we decided whether there would be a special surcharge on customers' bills.
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