Glad to hear that you yourself are ok. Any word on the others in the region?
It sounds like some places in the Parkersburg / Marietta area have power, but not many. Marietta, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia are cities that are next to each other with the Ohio River flowing between them. Even though they are next door to each other, it sounds like Parkersburg had more damage.
I've been texting on and off with PCS member Bill Peoples. He says they have no power at their house so he's riding the outage out on their houseboat on the river. He says they somehow have power at the yacht club, but nowhere else in town seems to. Maybe they have a super quiet generator and Bill didn't hear it running or solar panels. Who knows.
My brother lives in Marietta too. The power has been out since Friday at his place. Last night around midnight, the power came back on for about 10 minutes, but it went off again and hasn't been back on since. He and his girlfriend and their two dogs have been debating heading north, but they are still undecided. He wants to come up north and try to wedge the half a cow that he just got two days ago into a working freezer. She wants to stay with the dogs are ride it out. They say it will be at least 7-10 days until they have electricity again. People are wanting to get out of the city, but as of last night the gas stations were all closed or out of gas, so unless people have enough gas in their car to get out of there, they're stuck. I haven't been able to get much in terms of updates from him today because his cell phone battery was almost dead. He was able to buy a car charger yesterday, but he didn't want to have the car running to charge the phone battery up the whole way since he has to conserve gas for the car.
Hopefully I'll know more about the power situation once my roommate gets down there tonight. He is being sent there for the next 7-10 days to head up the public communications for First Energy. So starting tomorrow morning, most of what you read on the power company's website about the outages, see in a newspaper, hear on the TV or radio from a First Energy spokesperson is probably from him. I asked my roommate how the website server got power back so quickly considering all I've been hearing says 7-10 days until the power is restored. His professional opinion is that it could easily go down again, but it depends where it is located in relation to the high voltage lines and substations - those come back first. So it's possible that we'll still have some website outages as everything gets prepared. It's really hard to say.
