Hurricane Ike strips power from 20 percent of Ohio public power customers

When then remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through Ohio on September 14,2008 it stripped away electric service for nearly three million customers in the state, including approximately 74,000 municipal electric customers. Among the hardest hit member communities were Hamilton and Westerville, which together had approximately one -third of those outages. A polling of Ohio member communities found that approximately 40 percent of the communities had some outages.

            Five member communities requested mutual aid assistance 16 member communities responded to the call. Prospect and Hamilton were the first to ask for assistance, followed Westerville and Yellow Springs. Blanchester also requested aid dealing with a widespread number of customer outages. As the scope became apparent, more crews were dispatched to assist the hardest hit communities.

            Bryan went to the aid of Prospect, which had relatively little damaged, and helped restore power there by early Monday morning. The Bryan crew then headed further south to Westerville, which also had help from Minister, New Bremen and Wellington. Additional crews from Napoleon and Wadsworth helped the central Ohio city restore power to approximately 14,000 customers, or more the 85 percent of Westerville's total customer base.

            Napoleon also responded to Hamilton's request, along with a crew from Bowling Green and tow from Hudson. Lebanon also sent a crew after power restoration was completed on its own system. At the peak of the outage, approximately one-third of Hamilton 30,000 customers were in the dark.

            Yellow Springs lost power to the entire village when the interconnection was lost, large trees came down throughout the village taking down distribution lines. Crews from Carey, Celina, Piqua, St.Mary's, Versailles and Wapakoneta responded and most services were ready when the interconnection was restored.

            Piqua, along with Tipp City, came to the aid of Blanchester.

            Piqua also provided mutual aid to DP&L in its service territory while Hudson and Cleveland Public Power provided aid to First Energy in the northeast corner of the state.Wadsworth crews went to the Duke Energy territory to provide aid in the southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky.