Historic Ohio storm tests FirstEnergy’s resolve

As of 10 a.m. EDT on Monday, FirstEnergy Corp. continued efforts to restore power to the roughly 6,400 customers in northeast Ohio who remained without service following last week’s onslaught of severe weather and tornadoes.

“This is a historic weather event for those of us in northeast Ohio,” FirstEnergy Ohio President Torrence Hinton said Friday afternoon during a press conference. “Many of us can empathize with our customers who remain without power because we, too, live and work within these local communities impacted by the storm.”

Hinton said the company’s high-voltage transmission line system was severely damaged by the Aug. 6 weather event, “which typically isn’t the case for most single weather events that we experience.”

New transmission lines are coming in by helicopter to replace the damaged lines, a move that saves time compared to driving the right of way for each tower, said Hinton, a utility industry veteran with 25 years under his belt who just took over his position at FirstEnergy seven weeks ago.

Power will be restored to the vast majority of customers by 11:30 p.m. EDT on Aug. 14, although Hinton said as restoration efforts continue, many customers will have power restored before then.

Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy has electric distribution companies that form one of the nation’s largest investor-owned electric systems, serving customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York.

On Aug. 8, FirstEnergy reported that power had been restored to more than 215,000 customers out of some 430,000 impacted customers of Ohio Edison and The Illuminating Company following the historic weather event on Aug. 6 in which four confirmed tornadoes having winds nearing 110 mph struck the Illuminating Company and Ohio Edison service areas.

Two of those tornadoes with winds of almost 110 mph hit Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and one of them, which measured 350 yards wide, traveled a 17-mile-long path through the heavily populated area of Brookpark to Bedford.

In addition, a wide area of damaging straight-line winds of 70-90 mph, known as a macroburst, struck roughly 225 square miles in Cuyahoga, Lake, and Geauga counties in Ohio.

FirstEnergy said this weather event is the most impactful storm to hit The Illuminating Company service territory since July 1993, when a powerful line of thunderstorms caused power outages to approximately 300,000 of the company’s customers.

“The Illuminating Company has not seen a storm event of this nature in more than 30 years,” Hinton confirmed, noting that the tornadoes brought down parts of FirstEnergy’s infrastructure that previously had withstood wind, rain, snow, and ice storms for many decades.

In total, more than 627,700 customers across FirstEnergy’s footprint in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey lost power due to the storm.

Mutual response unfolds

Mutual support efforts from other utilities and partners are also underway.

“Thousands of crews are working to restore power to the customers and communities affected by the tornadoes in Ohio last week. Restoration work is progressing as efficiently and safely as possible given the historic nature of the storm and the four confirmed tornadoes,” said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of Security and Preparedness for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI).

Hinton added, “We recognize that we cannot complete this [restoration] effort alone with our internal resources. That is why we immediately, as the storm was passing, initiated mutual assistance and we have mobilized a massive response team in order to assist us.”

Hinton said more than 7,5000 contractors and employees of other utility partners are already on site to help restore electric service and to clear fallen trees and limbs, including lineworkers, hazard responders, damage assessors, forestry crews and other support personnel, many working 16-hour shifts.

Other FirstEnergy employees also will be moved from across the company into northeast Ohio as the threat from Tropical Storm Debby passes, according to Hinton.

So far, more than 350 broken poles have been identified in Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake and Lorain counties in Ohio, and crews are actively replacing them, along with hanging hundreds of spans of wire as part of the restoration effort.

“Large, strong, mature trees were entirely uprooted and in some cases thrown into our power lines and equipment,” Hinton said.

Five staging sites have been set up across the greater Cleveland area to handle the influx of outside workers and help make the restoration process more efficient, and FirstEnergy has set up more than a dozen sites 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 will address the largest number of customers before moving on to more isolated issues. This typically begins with transmission and substation facilities and then prioritizes critical facilities like hospitals, communications and emergency response agencies.

Additionally, hundreds of isolated issues affect individual or small numbers of customers, and these are the most time-consuming because they require crews to go to each individual location to make repairs, the company said.

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