The Mingo County Commission has joined a growing list of individuals and organizations with questions regarding power outages from the snow storms which plagued the area during the week of Christmas.

The West Virginia Public Service Commission, the Kentucky Public Service Commission and Pike County Fiscal Court have all called for a complete investigation as to why hundreds of thousands of customers endured interrupted electric service for days following the storm. In addition, the Pike County Fiscal Court announced a law suit against American Electric Power.

Commissioner Greg “Hootie” Smith expressed his concerns at the Commission’s regular meeting yesterday.

“We are asking for a hearing with American Electric Power and the PSC,” Smith said. “We want to facilitate a forum to understand, to get to the bottom of these outages and see what we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Trees that had fallen on power lines were responsible for much of the interruption, and the county wanted to remove some of the trees from those lines, Smith said, but the power company would not allow it.

The outages come at the same time rates AEP charges have increased.

County Emergency Ser-vices Director Jarrod Flet-cher said his office has received numerous calls concerning December electric bills.

“We get 10 to 15 calls a day about the increase in power bills,” Fletcher told the Commission. “Some people say their bills have more than doubled.”

Phillip Moye, spokesperson for AEP, said an 11 percent increase took effect Oct. 1, 2009, but that there were other factors affecting electric bills in December.

“The billing cycle for December was 34 days, Moye said. “Usually, it is 29 or 30 days, which adds 10 percent to that monthly bill. Also, December 2009 was 20 percent colder than the same month last year, the first month of really cold weather, and since most electrical usage is for heating, bills will naturally go up.”

Some December power bills in Logan and Mingo counties, Moye explained, were based on estimated usage instead of actual readings. That was due to the storm.

“A lot of our meter readers were working to guide state workers [who came in to help with storm recovery] to the areas they were needed,” Moye said. “Our first priority was to restore service, not to read meters.”

He said customers’ usage meters will be read in January, and that they would be billed for the amount of power used since the estimated reading, so their bill will be based on the actual amount of electricity used.

To know whether their meter was read or estimated, they should look on the bill. Next to “previous usage” there will be a letter, an “A” denotes the meter was actually read, while an “E” shows an estimated usage. If a customer feels their estimated usage is too high, they can contact the power company about an adjustment.

“Some rumors are going around that AEP is charging people to pay for the cost of repairs after the snow storm,” Moye said. “That is not the case. We don’t even know how much storm recovery cost us.”

A meeting between AEP, the PSC and the MCC has not yet been scheduled.