By Ron Allen

As of Tuesday evening, February 23, close to one thousand Putnam residents were without electric power. Most of the thousand lost power on Wednesday, February 10, when an ice storm knocked out service to more than 8,000 in the county.

Appalachian Power managed to restore the electric to all except 1,200 customers when a second storm caused outages to soar to well above 16,000 on Monday, February 15. At one point on the 15th, 90% of all Hurricane addresses were without power.

Appalachian was able to reduce the outage number to 8,600 on Wednesday, February 17, and further reduce the number to 7,000 on Thursday. On Saturday, February 20, more than 4,300 Putnam residents were still without power. Appalachian managed to restore service to all except 3,000 on Sunday, when the temperatures dipped into the single digits. The power company further reduced the outages to 1,800 on Monday, February 22.

The following table lists outages for eight area spanning February 15 to 23.