Photo credit: FirstEnergy
As of 10 a.m. EDT Monday, FirstEnergy Corp. continued efforts to restore power to approximately 6,400 customers in northeast Ohio who were still without service following last week’s severe weather and tornadoes.
“This is a historic weather event for us in Northeast Ohio,” said Torrence Hinton, president of FirstEnergy Ohio, during a press conference Friday afternoon. “Many of us sympathize with our customers who remain without power, as we also live and work in the communities affected by the storm.”
Hinton said the company’s high-voltage transmission line system was severely damaged by the Aug. 6 weather event, “which is not typically the case with most individual weather events we experience.”
New power lines are flown in by helicopter to replace the damaged ones, saving time compared to clearing the right-of-way for each tower, said Hinton, a 25-year energy industry veteran who started his job at FirstEnergy just seven weeks ago.
By 11:30 p.m. EDT on August 14, power will be restored to the vast majority of customers. However, Hinton said restoration efforts will continue, but many customers will have power restored before then.
FirstEnergy, based in Akron, Ohio, owns electric distribution companies that form one of the largest investor-owned power systems in the country, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York.
On August 8, FirstEnergy reported that power had been restored to more than 215,000 of the approximately 430,000 affected Ohio Edison and The Illuminating Company customers following the historic weather event on August 6, in which four confirmed tornadoes with wind speeds of nearly 110 mph (177 km/h) struck The Illuminating Company’s service areas.
Two of these tornadoes, with wind speeds of nearly 110 mph (177 km/h), struck Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and one of them, which was 1,050 feet (320 meters) wide, cut a 17-mile (27-kilometer) path through the densely populated area from Brookpark to Bedford.
In addition, a large area of destructive straight-line winds with speeds of 70 to 90 miles per hour (a so-called macroburst) was struck, spanning approximately 225 square miles in Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties in Ohio.
According to FirstEnergy, this weather event is the most devastating storm in the Illuminating Company’s service area since July 1993, when a series of severe thunderstorms caused power outages for approximately 300,000 of the company’s customers.
“The Illuminating Company has not experienced a storm event of this nature in over 30 years,” Hinton confirmed, pointing out that the tornadoes destroyed parts of FirstEnergy’s infrastructure that had previously withstood decades of wind, rain, snow and ice storms.
In total, more than 627,700 customers in FirstEnergy’s service area in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey were without power due to the storm.
Mutual reaction unfolds
In addition, there are also efforts to provide mutual support with other utilities and partners.
“We recognize that we cannot handle this (recovery) effort with our internal resources alone,” Hinton said. “That’s why we immediately initiated mutual aid as the storm passed and mobilized a large response team to assist us.”
Hinton said more than 7,500 contractors and other utility workers are already on site to help restore power and clear fallen trees and limbs. They include linemen, hazard workers, damage assessors, forestry workers and other support personnel, many of whom are working 16-hour shifts.
Other FirstEnergy employees from across the company will also be relocated to northeast Ohio once the threat from Tropical Storm Debby has passed, according to Hinton.
So far, more than 350 downed poles have been identified in Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake and Lorain counties in Ohio. As part of the restoration effort, workers are replacing them and hanging hundreds of lines.
“Large, strong, mature trees were completely uprooted and in some cases hurled into our power lines and equipment,” Hinton said.
Five staging areas have been set up in the Cleveland area to accommodate the influx of outside workers and make the rebuilding process more efficient. In addition, FirstEnergy has set up more than a dozen locations to provide free water and ice to customers who remain without power.
FirstEnergy said it follows a formal restoration process after severe weather, focusing on repairs that affect the largest number of customers before moving on to more isolated problems, typically starting with transmission and substations and then prioritizing critical facilities such as hospitals, communications and emergency services.
In addition, hundreds of isolated issues affect one or a few customers, which are the most time-consuming because teams have to travel to each individual location to carry out the repair, the company said.
