Tornado Havoc Has Ohio Residents Facing Week-Long Power Cuts

(Bloomberg) -- Thousands of FirstEnergy Corp.’s customers in Ohio will potentially be without power until next week after two tornadoes hit the northeastern part of the state on Tuesday. 

About 252,000 customers of The Illuminating Company were still experiencing outages as of 2 p.m., while 7,900 Ohio Edison customers remain without electricity, FirstEnergy said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. While some of those should be reconnected between today and Saturday, others may not be re-energized until Aug. 14. Downed trees and closed roads have made restoration in some areas challenging, the company said.

The latest weather event is the worst to have hit The Illuminating Company service area since 1993, when thunderstorms caused outages for about 300,000 of its customers. Disconnections from Hurricane Sandy and Ike were fewer, according to FirstEnergy. There are approximately 300 broken poles that need to be replaced and other areas with equipment problems, the company said. 

“A well-organized severe weather event” pummeled Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania Tuesday, knocking down trees and power lines and even damaging some houses, said Josh Weiss, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Center. 

Two tornadoes were tracked across Lorain and Cuyahoga Counties, the National Weather Service said. One had top winds of 110 miles (177 kilometers) per hour, while the other peaked at 104 mph. Numerous utility poles were destroyed around Parma, Ohio, and there was extensive damage to trees throughout the region.

(Updates outage numbers in second paragraph and adds further details from company in third paragraph.)

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