Power outage impacts over 1,000 people

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Over 1,100 customers lost power for three hours in Marietta early Tuesday morning.
AEP Ohio reported a power outage happened at 2:24 a.m. Tuesday and power was restored by 5:23 a.m. It affected 1,136 customers, a AEP Power spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the area most impacted was in the north end of town and into the Devola area. The cause was an “equipment issue” which has been addressed and “replaced and fixed,” according to the spokesperson.
The outage impacted Marietta Memorial Hospital for a couple of hours, she said.
Just before noon Tuesday, Memorial Health System Associate Vice President of Service Excellence Jennifer Offenberger said in a statement the outage impacted the hospital but not in any way that affected patients or patient care.
“The biggest impact it had on us was the Strecker building doesn’t have emergency generators, so a sprinkler line filled with water and froze, but we were able to save and fix it,” she said. “We had some blinking on an off until generators picked up, but they did pick up as they are expected to.
“It is taking some time to get portion of the building heat back up to normal, and otherwise, all is functioning as it should.”
No city or county systems were reported greatly impacted by the outage.
Marietta Mayor Josh Schlicher said he was made aware of the outage on Tuesday and impacts along Front Street, Second Street, Third Street and around the fairgrounds.
He got a notice Saturday from AEP Ohio that they were monitoring regional power grids due to the extreme cold and working with PJM Interconnection, a regional power grid operator, to maintain electric power service across the region.
“None of our city facilities were affected,” Schlicher said of the water treatment plant near the hospital and other services. “We have backup generators on all of those things.
“I have not heard of any major effects on our equipment or any downtime.”
Washington County Commissioner Charlie Schilling said he did not hear about the outage until asked about it Tuesday afternoon.
“I haven’t heard of any problems,” he said. “With the temperatures as cold as they were (Monday night and Tuesday morning) I appreciate AEP getting their men and women out into the field and getting that taken care of within three hours.
“That is big.”