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2,500 homes in Barbour lose power

By Edgar Kelley 2 min read

ELKINS -- Officials are still unsure about what caused the power outage that left more than 2,500 Barbour County residents without electricity Wednesday.

After being without power for more than 15 hours, electricity was finally restored Wednesday evening for most of the 2,528 customers that were affected in Barbour County.

At approximately 2 a.m. Wednesday morning, residents in the county began reporting outages. It wasn't until after 5 p.m. Wednesday evening that electricity was restored for some customers.

As of 10 a.m. Thursday morning, only a handful of Barbour residents were still without power, according to the MonPower outage website.

Thunderstorms rolled through the area late Tuesday night and may have caused the outage, Barbour County Deputy Office of Emergency Management Director Dylan Harper told The Inter-Mountain Thursday.

"To be honest, nobody is really sure right now what caused the outages," he said. "We had some storms go through the county, but they mainly hit out around the Preston County area of the county.

"Nobody really reported any major storms in the Belington area, where most of the power outages were. There were some pole damages in the Belington area, but they were really not sure what caused it."

The City of Belington opened the Civic Center as a power station for those who needed to charge critical devices on Wednesday.

"Belington City Hall reached out to us and let us know that they opened up the Civic Center to allow people with oxygen and concentrators to come in and plug up," Harper said. "Typically during an extended outage like we had, we'll set something up to help residents out.

"We have the Laurel View Apartments in Belington, where a lot of elderly individuals live, so we have to have somewhere for them to come in and keep their medical devices running."

There were still approximately 1,900 customers in West Virginia without power Thursday morning, with the largest number, 635, being in Greenbrier County, according to the MonPower site.

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