Work continues after storm

ASHLAND Power companies and first-responders were among the busiest folks over the last few days as the remnants of Hurricane Helene caused significant damage throughout the area.

By Saturday night, Kentucky Power crews restored more than 50% of its customers affected since the peak outage of 44,000 on Friday. As of Saturday night, there were fewer than 20,000 outages — most of them were in Boyd, Greenup and Leslie counties.

The Ashland Fire Department released a rundown of its calls from Friday. The first storm calls occurred around noon Friday.

AFD crews responded to nearly 100 calls within 12 hours, consisting of the following: utility lines down, trees down in roadways, trees on utility lines, trees on houses, utility poles broken, flooding of houses, fire alarms, vehicle accidents and commercial structure fire.

AFD called out extra staff and placed its reserve truck in-service, answering calls as well. The height of the storm, according to AFD, was between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. with 80 calls happening during that time window. During the peak, according to AFD, it had 10 different units out on the road answering calls.

Several vehicle accidents occurred, all of which involved minor injuries.

AFD also responded to a water rescue on Armco Road as a vehicle stalled in flood water with occupants still inside. The rescue crews managed to safely remove people from the vehicle.