Weather

Linemen spell OHIO with their arms and surround a woman holding an Ohio State Buckeyes banner.

Chuck Chafin has worked on electric lines with the South Central Power Company for 18 years, during which time he’s seen his share of power outages and general destruction both in Ohio, and beyond, caused by extremes in weather.

So while he wasn’t particularly surprised at the damage that he and 72 other lineworkers and supervisors from Ohio’s electric cooperative network found in Georgia in the wake of Hurricane Irma in early September, it still presented a big job.

Shelter, food, clean water, electricity — these are the essentials of life in today’s world. For all the technology and innovation available in our modern society, these essentials can still be stripped away in minutes by the power of nature. Across much of Texas, Florida, and nearby states, recovery efforts are underway as of this writing from hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Hopefully by the time you read this, these essentials will have been restored to everyone impacted by these storms.

A lineworker takes a chainsaw to a fallen limb.

At the beginning of March 2017, after what had been, to that point, an unusually mild winter, a huge storm system came through southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, bringing with it winds that brought down trees and power lines and causing power outages in large swaths of the area.

Electric cooperatives do everything they can — regular maintenance, tree-trimming, etc. — to prevent such outages, but sometimes, Mother Nature has her own ideas. When outages do happen, the co-ops are ready.

Blazing hot days in August, bone-chilling cold days in February — what do those weather extremes have to do with the cost of electricity? More than the bottom line on your electric bill.

Explaining the connection is a big part of the workday for Kara Snyder, marketing and key accounts manager at Butler Rural Electric Cooperative in Oxford, about 40 miles north of Cincinnati.

At the center of Snyder’s conversations are little boxes containing radio-controlled switches that can be installed on certain kinds of water heaters and many air-conditioning systems.

Lightning flashes in the middle of a storm.

As an Ohio resident, you know from experience that the Midwest region of the United States undergoes a wide variety of severe storms year-round. What is less commonly known is how much havoc this weather wrecks on the region — more than $3 billion on average is lost each year to storms in the Midwest with over $2.4 billion of that in property damages, according to the Illinois State Water Survey Report.

It’s during these storms, especially when power outages occur, that electric cooperatives must unite to keep members safe.