Kanawha City , Kanawha County , West Virginia

Lights are on and the hair dryers are going.

But that wasn't the case at Syrra Salon in Kanawha City Thursday morning.

"It's pretty frustrating when you get to work when you depend on electricity to keep clients happy," said Melanie Fisher, manager at Syrra Salon.

Fisher is just one of nearly 3,000 AEP customers left in the dark thursday morning.
AEP is reporting someone stripped copper from the wires at the compressor sub-station on Chesterfield Avenue.

"It is just a continuous source of frustration for us. Ongoing because it happens all over the state and all over our service territory. It's very dangerous and it costs us a lot of money to repair service and it takes a lot of customers out of service," said Jeri Matheny, AEP spokesperson.

And the outages were frustrating for those trying to do business without electricity, but Fisher says they did the best they could to keep their customers happy.

The salon went as far as moving stations to the window so they could cut hair by sunlight. To add to the inconvenience, it was about 40 degrees in the salon and people were not really comfortable sitting around with their heads wet at 40 degrees.

Another business effected by the outage was Tim Hogan's Carpet.

"It is an inconvenience, but you know, we're kind of used to it this year. This is the third time," said Pete Winslow, manager at Tim Hogan's Carpet.

Winslow dealt with power outages earlier this year when the summer derecho hit and the more recent super storm Sandy.

Those outages were caused by mother nature. However, this time it's a little more personal because the loss of power was caused by other people.

"Well I hope they catch those guys. You know I mean these are tough enough times anyways and when you're saddled with something like this it just adds to your heartbreak as far as business goes," said Winslow.

Heartbreak caused by copper thieves.

"They don't think about anyone but themselves obviously," said Fisher, "They don't think about the inconvenience they cause businesses."

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