POMEROY — Less than 1,000 AEP Ohio customers in Meigs County were without power Sunday but most were expected to be restored to service by midnight last night. However, melting ice and snow and extremely slippery and hazardous conditions are causing additional outages in the region.

Approximately 20,000 customers remained without power on Sunday throughout Southern Ohio. Local outages were spread throughout the county on Sunday. The Village of Middleport was restored on Thursday night and Friday, but customers in some rural areas remain in the dark.

Nearly 3,000 Meigs County customers remained without power on Friday, and 983 were without it at presstime Sunday.

The majority of customers that remain without power are concentrated in the Wellston and Portsmouth areas, and AEP said it moving more resources — meaning workers — to these hardest hit areas today.

AEP Ohio had over 1,500 personnel including internal crews, contract crews and tree crews, plus hundreds of internal company employees helping with the restoration efforts. Bitter cold, snowy, icy roads and remote locations worked together to hamper crews’ efforts to restore electricity.

On Friday, the company said Wednesday’s ice storm caused high voltage transmission lines to come down. These are the lines on the towers that distribute higher voltage from the generation plants to the substations. They are areas not easily accessible because of bad road conditions and rough terrain.

Crews have used chains on their tires to get to the damage locations.

At mid-week, during the height of the outage, AEP reported 150,000 were without electricity.