CITIZEN STAFF REPORT
Kentucky Power says Martin County is among the eastern Kentucky areas receiving targeted reliability upgrades as the utility focuses on circuits with the highest outage history and the greatest potential impact for customers.
The company said crews across its eastern Kentucky service territory are carrying out vegetation management, equipment upgrades and new technology installations aimed at reducing outages and shortening restoration times.
“This work is very intentional,” said Michele Ross, Kentucky Power’s vice president of operations. “We’re not approaching this broadly — we’re targeting circuits and areas where we know improvements will have the greatest impact for our customers.”
Ross said one of those projects is in Martin County, where crews are building new tie-line connections intended to improve reliability for customers in the Dewey, Inez and Wolf Creek areas.
Tie lines link circuits so power can be rerouted during an outage, allowing crews to isolate damaged sections and restore service to many customers more quickly, even before permanent repairs are completed.
In mountainous, heavily wooded terrain such as Martin County that flexibility can significantly reduce outage durations, the company said.
Across eastern Kentucky, crews are completing vegetation work along more than 1,600 miles of power lines, focusing on circuits where tree-related outages have been most frequent. The utility is also upgrading infrastructure on 117 priority circuits by replacing aging poles, crossarms and transformers.
In addition, the company said it is installing new devices at more than 800 locations across its service area to limit the number of customers affected during outages and speed restoration.
“Because affordability is such a concern in eastern Kentucky, this very targeted approach allows us to invest where our customers realize the greatest benefit,” Ross said. “We are keenly aware of the concerns our customers have but they also deserve reliable power.”
The work is being guided by outage history, equipment condition and circuit performance data, with crews prioritizing areas that have seen repeated or longer-duration outages, according to the company.