County judge chides Kentucky Power

Kentucky Power Right-of-Way Maintenance faces scrutiny after ice storms, with tree trimming, power line clearing, and outage prevention questioned by Pike and Letcher counties, the Public Service Commission, and residents amid rural, heavily forested terrain.

A judge-executive in eastern Kentucky is criticizing a power utility for "pure neglect" he said led to widespread outages during a recent winter storm.

Pike County Judge-Executive Wayne Rutherford said Kentucky Power Co. has not done an adequate job of clearing tree growth around power lines in right of way areas.

"Everyone in this county has noticed for years that the power company has neglected to clear their rights of way near the power lines," Rutherford wrote in a letter to the Kentucky Public Service Commission.

Rutherford said over half the county lost power during the mid-December storm, which knocked out electricity to 100,000 homes across eastern Kentucky. Officials in neighboring Letcher County have also complained about right of way maintenance by Kentucky Power, even amid Kentucky power bills increasing across the state in the wake of the December storm.

The heavy snow and ice buckled branches and trees, sending them crashing into power lines across the area.

Kentucky Power spokesman Ronn Robinson said that he had not seen Rutherford's letter but said the utility, a unit of American Electric Power, which has faced a new inquiry on outages in other jurisdictions, spends millions of dollars each year clearing the rights of way.

"In eastern Kentucky it's a challenge to maintain right of ways. It's predominantly rural, it's heavily forested," Robinson said. Robinson said many of the outages were caused by trees that fell from outside the right of way areas around power lines, and in Ohio regulators said utilities could have communicated better during similar storm events.

Rutherford said many Pike County residents had their food supplies spoil when the power went down, in some homes for 10 days.

"Can you imagine the amount of food lost?" Rutherford wrote in the letter. He said he is "hopeful a class action lawsuit will be filed on behalf of the Pike County families who lost all their food."

Robinson declined to comment on any potential legal actions.

Public Service Commission spokesman Andrew Melnykovych said in an e-mail that the agency is responding to resident concerns by conducting an "onsite review by members of our engineering inspection staff." He said any further action would be determined after that evaluation is done, with the Kentucky PSC also seeking more reliability data to guide decisions going forward.

In Letcher County a grand jury is being assembled to look into whether Kentucky Power could have done more to prevent widespread electrical outages during the storm. Commonwealth's Attorney Edison Banks said he received complaints from residents that said Kentucky Power wasn't doing enough to keep electrical line rights of way cleared of trees, and consumer advocates have taken a stand against rate increases amid those frustrations as well.

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