By Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia has a long history with long power outages.
The latest episode continued well into Monday, 11 days after the first of two ice storms that triggered a peak of 97,000 outages among Appalachian Power customers, leaving thousands scrambling in Southwestern West Virginia as they struggled to cook food and get warm as temperatures stubbornly stayed in the 20s and teens.
Winter storms caused power grids across the United States to fail last week. The deep freeze left more than 4 million people grappling with outages last week in Texas alone.
But it was West Virginia that had the highest total number of outages and percentage of outages among customers throughout the country Sunday and Monday, according to national outage trackers powered by Data Fusion Solutions and Bluefield Studios LLC.
West Virginia still had more than 26,000 outages Monday afternoon, more than any other state, and its statewide percentage of customers without power, 2.67%, was more than twice as much as the state with the next highest clip, Mississippi…