WHEELING - Approximately 10,000 American Electric Power customers in the Ohio Valley remained without power late Sunday.
According to AEP Ohio spokeswoman Carmen Prati-Miller, AEP Ohio had restored power to more than 250,000 of the 660,000 customers affected by the storms by 6 p.m. Sunday.
In the local area, at the height of the outages around 2 a.m. Saturday, about 40,000 customers were affected on both sides of the river.
That number was down to about 9,900 late Sunday - 3,900 in Belmont County, 2,600 in Ohio County and 3,400 in Marshall County. According to AEP, about 14 percent of Belmont County customers lacked electricity, while the power was out for 11 percent of Ohio County and 19 percent of Marshall County.
Harrison County had 1,200 homes and businesses without power, while Monroe County had 1,200 reported outages. That translates into 17 percent of Harrison customers - but around 70 percent for Monroe County's 1,100 customers.
"This is the worse thing we have ever experienced," Prati-Miller said. "It's been catastrophic."
In Belmont County, many residents will not have power restored until midnight Wednesday, and in Ohio and Marshall counties the lights may not be on again until midnight Friday. In Jefferson County, power was 100-percent restored Sunday afternoon.
An additional 20,000 customer outages were reported in Ohio as a result storms Sunday evening. Approximately 435,000, or 45 percent, of AEP Ohio's customers remained without power in the state at 9 p.m. Sunday.
Prati-Miller said AEP Ohio has more than 4,000 internal and external personnel committed to restoring power to the customers who remain without service from the storm.
"We have all available crews working," she added. "We have crews in from as far away as Alabama, Philadelphia, Pa., and New York."
She said AEP Ohio is working around the clock to restore service to customers as safely and quickly as possible. Line crews are working16 hours a day and support resources also work through the night to reconcile restoration completed during the day to prepare work packages, maps and instructions for the crews to use the following morning.
