FirstEnergy says thousands of repairs still needed to restore power to all customers

AKRON, Ohio - FirstEnergy said on Tuesday that thousands of repairs must be made before power is restored to customers who lost electricity during the major storm.

The utility company, based in Akron, stressed again that some customers could be without power until this weekend.

Mark Durbin, spokesman for FirstEnergy, said linemen are working as quickly as possible to get big chunks of people back online.

"Probably, it's going to end up that those locations where we just have one or two customers out, that's going to take a while, but again, when you have potentially thousands of different locations where we have to go and make a repair, that's why it takes time to do that," Durbin said.

The Ohio State Patrol and Richfield police were making arrangements to slow down traffic in both directions on Interstate 77 near Wheatley Road, so that lineman could make a repair that would restore power to 41 customers. However, FirstEnergy decided to go with plan B, and started the process of adding a 300-foot section of line in a Richfield neighborhood so crews didn't have to cross I-77.

Under the original idea, the workers would have literally run a transmission line across the interstate and made a connection to restore power.

"The whole idea is if you slow down the traffic very slowly, that gives us the time we need to run across, attach it and restore those customers to service," Durbin said, prior to the linemen coming up with the alternative plan.

Durbin said making these types of decisions illustrates why it takes so long to get electricity back in some cases.

Marolyn Smith, of Richfield, has been without power since 2 a.m. on Tuesday.

"I was watching TV and all of a sudden, everything went out," Smith said.

She has called FirstEnergy several times and listened to a recorded message telling her that the area is experiencing widespread outages and repairs could take a while.

"We've been hoping it would come back on, and we do have a generator and we did plug our freezer in because we didn't want to lose all that food," Smith said.

Chuck Witherup, also of Richfield, said in addition to no electricity and heat, his family also does not have running water because they have a well system.

"It works off a pump and you need electricity for the pump to come out of the ground," Witherup said.

But Witherup and Smith got some welcome relief when their power was restored late Wednesday afternoon.

As of Tuesday afternoon, FirstEnergy estimated 140,000 customers were still without power.  Cuyahoga, Lake and Lorain counties continue to have the mot outages.

Cleveland Public Power reported that less than 1,000 of its customers were still in the dark.