Unsure when the electricity would return, Bair, of Heritage Road, spent Sunday night at sold-out Drury Inn & Suites in Middletown.
When he returned home Monday morning, he was elated to learn that his electricity was restored following the violent storms that swept through Friday night and caused thousands of outages in the region.
“Man, it’s been miserable,” he said.
Duke Energy expected 95 percent of its customers would have their power restored by midnight Monday, said Paige Sheehan, a Duke spokeswoman. She said crews worked “incredibly hard” since Friday night with the assistance of workers from nine states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri.
After Friday night’s storm, Sheehan said 230,000 customers in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana were without power.
In Hamilton, Anthony Pochard from the Hamilton electric company said power was restored to all residents in the city. He said power to about 10 homes won’t be restored until after the homeowner makes repairs to their equipment.
Pochard said workers are still repairing some of the city’s street lights. On Friday night, he said, 3,400 customers were without power. Power was restored to all homes in Hamilton by 3 p.m. Sunday.
The hardest hit areas were in Middletown, Franklin and Carlisle, according to Duke. A caravan of utility trucks from Michigan drove around the cities Monday restoring power one home at a time.
Ohio’s top utility regulator says his agency will review what lessons can be learned from the weekend’s massive power outages after people get their service restored.
Friday’s severe weather left hundreds of thousands without electricity as winds reached 80 mph. Another round of storms struck on Sunday.
Todd Snitchler, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, said once power is back on, the commission would take a look at whether utility companies have been aggressive about keeping trees away from lines and updating utility poles.
On Monday morning, Sherman and Patty Shepherd sat on their front porch on Elm in Franklin while workers restored their electricity after a downed tree in the back yard knocked out their power. It reminded the Shepherds of September 2008 when remnants of Hurricane Ike knocked out their power for 15 days.
“We’re tickled to death for only three days,” said Sherman Shepherd, an Armco retiree.
“We were looking for them and praying they’d come and fix it,” his wife added.
For the last three days, they used a generator to operate their refrigerator and freezer during the afternoon and fans during the night. They estimated the temperature inside their home reached 100 degrees.
“It felt like a week,” Patty Shepherd said.
Leslie Sprigg, a utility spokeswoman, said DP&L joined the Southeastern Electric and visited utilities in the “hurricane belt” following Hurricane Ike in 2008 to get pointers on dealing with widespread hurricane damage.
Another major lesson from Ike were the necessity of “hardening” the electrical system and the importance of removing overhanging tree limbs from the power right of way.
“We’ve replaced over 10,000 wooden poles with metal ones,” Nickel said, “and we’ve redoubled our tree trimming. We’ve gone all through our system in the past four years. That’s a huge thing.”
Sprigg said the utility has cut back trees along the utility’s 10,000 miles of power lines.
Despite the hardening of the system and additional planning, Bryce Nickel, DP&L senior vice president for operations, admitted the storm was too much. “We don’t get hurricane force winds in Ohio. Yet its happened twice. He had steel poles sheared off at their base. I can’t imagine a system that can completely hold up against a storm that stretched from Fort Wayne to Washington, D.C.
“You can’t build a system to withstand that.”
Jason Black, research leader in energy, environment and material sciences at the research and technology company Battelle, said technology exists to help utilities better identify outages and redirect power, but that technology is costly and might not be useful in a major storm.
“That works when there’s a fault here and there, but when you have massive storm like just happened, and there are faults everywhere, there’s not an easy solution to reconfigure anyway,” said Black, who is based in Columbus and whose home lost power for a day last weekend. “It’s difficult for any company to be totally ready for something like that.”
The Associated Press and Reporter Doug Page contributed to this story.
Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2842 or rmccrabb@coxohio.com.
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