Lawton, OK, August 23, 2004 – 15 Public Service Company of Oklahoma employees from the Lawton area will return home today after working to restore power to communities hit by Hurricane Charley in Florida. The PSO employees left Lawton for Florida on August 11.  They worked in the Tampa area, under the direction of Tampa Electric, and then in Orlando with Progress Energy. 

Residents of the damaged areas were glad to see the additional help.  One Progress Energy customer wrote, “I just wanted to send thanks to your company and crew for helping us restore power and get our lives back to normal.  I know it must have taken days for the trucks to arrive, and will take days to get back home.  With such widespread damage across our state, I would still be sitting in the dark without your help.”

Another Florida resident wrote, “Hurricane Charley left our entire community without power for five days.  The sight of the Oklahoma AEP trucks was a welcome sight.  Polite and efficient, these men had us up within a day of entering our neighborhood.”

The PSO group includes employees from Lawton, Duncan, Chickasha and Hobart. PSO employees from Atoka, Idabel, McAlester and Okmulgee also assisted in the hurricane recovery effort.  PSO sent a total of 32 employees to Florida.
        
PSO, a unit of American Electric Power, is an electric utility company serving more than 505,000 customers in eastern and southwestern Oklahoma.  Based in Tulsa, PSO has more than 4,000 megawatts of generating capacity and offers some of the lowest energy prices in the United States.
     
PSO’s parent company, American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP), owns more than 36,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the United States and is the nation´s largest electricity generator.  AEP is also one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, with more than 5 million customers linked to AEP’s 11-state electricity transmission and distribution grid.  The company is based in Columbus, Ohio.