"Last year wasn't the first time our old service center flooded, so we decided it was the right time to move to a higher location," said Holly Kauffman, president of FirstEnergy's West Virginia operations. "Our new facility is a spacious building that offers twice the amount of storage space than we had before. There is plenty of room indoors to park all of our trucks and store much of the materials we need to upgrade electric facilities and make repairs to keep the lights on for our customers."
Mon Power renovated the new location, which was used previously by another company to store records. Modifications included adding a new garage entrance in the side of the building tall enough to comfortably fit bucket and digger trucks, and reconfiguring the interior to accommodate new locker rooms with showers, restrooms, crew rooms and a large conference room.
"Winters are fierce in Webster County, and the ability to park all of our trucks inside a climate-controlled garage and out of the weather is a real benefit for our line crews and, ultimately, our customers," Kauffman said. "We can respond to outage calls more quickly when we don't need to scrape frozen windshields and remove snow from trucks."