Only a fraction of the 5,200 customers of West Penn Power in Butler County who lost electricity in an afternoon storm Monday still were in the dark Tuesday afternoon.

Todd Meyers, West Penn Power spokesman, said company crews work under a protocol that prioritizes restoring electricity to the largest groups first, so it is typical for small numbers of customers to go without power longer than population centers.

“What you're looking for is fixes that bring the largest amount of customers back online at a time,” Meyers said. “If you have a tree down on a large line, you have to clear that hazard. You wouldn't get your work done in a quick way if you went to each area and then made the fix.”

According to Meyers, West Penn was expecting to see a large-scale power outage Monday before the clouds even began rolling in to Butler County. The company has meteorologists on staff, as well as “several hundred” line workers on call for large outage situations, Meyers said.

As calls reporting power outages come in, those workers can be dispatched. Sometimes other workers also are mobilized to help with certain problems, like ensuring a downed wire doesn’t cause harm, Meyers said.

“They may be a meter reader, an office worker; we give them training and safety equipment and they will babysit a downed line to make sure a kid or a pet doesn't come into contact with it,” Meyers said.

Meyers said people should never touch a downed wire, because an active wire could shock or kill anyone who makes contact with it.

While workers are often able to find the cause of an area outage, Meyers said there can sometimes be some sleuthing involved. Wires and smart meters have communication technology built in which can alert crews to an issue, but sometimes the problem causing an outage isn’t immediately evident.

“When you have snow on the ground or high water, you have to do some sleuthing,” Meyers said. “We'll have to sometimes go out there and follow the wires until we find the problem.”

The “estimated time of restoration“ listed on West Penn’s outage center always is an estimate, Meyers said. But when there has been a large-scale power outage in a region, there almost always is a crew working on a solution.

“It's all a matter of moving through things methodically with some kind of plan in mind,” Meyers said.