After 11 days without power, Donald and Dolores Ward of Spring Valley finally got their “electric” back on Monday, July 9.

But Wednesday, Don called back into the newspaper to report that the power at his home was out again. Like thousands of West Virginians, the Wards have found the massive outages of the past two weeks much more than frustrating. Ward requires oxygen, which requires electricity, so the 85-year-old had to stay with friends and at local hotels during the outages. …

Like the Wards, we all have a lot of questions about what happened, and we deserve some answers. There is no reason to believe the utilities did not do all they could to restore service as quickly as they could. But what can be done going forward to better prepare for such natural disasters, not only from the utility standpoint but in terms of emergency and community response.

That is what Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin hopes to accomplish with a comprehensive review of the state’s response to the storms, which left an estimated 1.4 million of the state’s 1.8 million residents without power at one point or another.

Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Jimmy Gianato will head up the project along with National Guard Major Gen. James Hoyer and Tomblin’s general counsel Peter Markham. The review will include state agencies, local emergency operations and volunteer efforts, as well as utilities and medical facilities and services. …

We urge Gianato and his team to dig deep and ask big questions. …

Where are we most vulnerable when power outages occur? Many of us might not have thought about the Wards’ need for power for his oxygen supply. But the recent trend toward home health care has moved critical services beyond the reach of the hospitals’ emergency generators. Water systems and wells that depend on electrical power are another major point of concern.

We know we can’t control Mother Nature and “stuff happens,” but the people of West Virginia deserve a thorough examination of how we might reduce outages and better plan and prepare for those that occur.

Tomblin is asking the right questions, and we hope his team provides some answers.