WCI in Warren shut down production for two shifts.

WCI in Warren shut down production for two shifts.
STAFF/WIRE REPORT
YOUNGSTOWN -- Ohio Edison customers generally can count on highly reliable electric service, but there are no guarantees that the cascading power failure that affected the East Coast and Great Lakes shorelines can't happen here, the company's local manager said.
"I think a word to the wise is to always be prepared in case there is an outage," said Paul Harkey, the company's Youngstown area manager.
Harkey said the company's service history is 99.97 percent reliability over a multiyear period but would have been reduced significantly by this summer's unusual storm activity in this area.
"The sectionalizer and the disconnects operated properly,'' Thursday for the power grid serving the Mahoning Valley. "It isolated our system," he said.
Power for the Mahoning Valley comes from the Ohio River area, not the Great Lakes area, and the Sammis power plant in Toronto, Ohio, which serves the Mahoning Valley, remained in operation.
The power transmission grids serving this country are interconnected, but they have safety devices designed to prevent cascading and domino effects, Harkey explained.
"The safety valves that were in place to prevent [the blackout] from coming down to our area obviously worked," he said.
Be prepared
Despite the overall reliability of electric service, he urged everyone to have flashlights, fresh batteries and battery-operated radios available just in case and to protect their computers with surge protectors.
If power is out, avoid opening the refrigerator or freezer door, and turn off major appliances. If the door isn't opened, food can stay in the refrigerator for 36 to 48 hours without spoiling, he said.
FirstEnergy Corp. officials today also asked customers with power to reduce energy consumption as they restore power to customers in Northern Ohio.
"While the company expects to be able to restore service to those remaining customers later today, there is a significant likelihood that the region will have a shortfall of generation because a number of power plants are out of service due to yesterday's outage," the company said.
If a power generation shortfall takes place today as customer demand grows, the company said it would reduce customer load on a rolling basis, with affected circuits taken out of service four hours at a time.
In an effort to reduce power, FirstEnergy initiated its emergency provision for industrial and commercial customers on interruptible contracts from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. today.
WCI Steel in Warren was one local industrial customer affected today by the emergency provision which requires users to keep their power usage below a specified level. The mill employs about 1,800.
Tim Roberts, a WCI spokesman, said the steel mill shut down production for its day and afternoon shifts today and production workers were advised to stay home. Some shipping continued, he said, and office personnel were working as usual.
In his 35 years with Ohio Edison, Harkey said he couldn't recall the Mahoning Valley's being hit by cascading power failures similar to the ones that hit the East Coast, Great Lakes and Canada on Thursday.
Power was out in Cleveland, Akron and Ashtabula in Ohio and Erie, Meadville and Oil City in Pennsylvania.
The Perry Nuclear Power Plant was shut down as a precaution.
Power was restored in Ashtabula about 9:15 p.m. after a First Energy plant there was brought back into service, according to Mark Durbin, a public relations representative for FirstEnergy, parent company of Ohio Edison and Penn Power.
Areas affected
The lights stayed on in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but outages occurred in Erie, Crawford, Warren, Venango and Clarion counties in Pennsylvania.
Power was out at Conneaut Lake Park, but nobody was trapped on rides.
At Cedar Point in Sandusky, riders were stranded on the Magnum roller coaster for 20 minutes before they could walk down.
No blackouts or brownouts were reported in Mercer County, Pa., a 911 dispatcher said.
Penn Power spokesman Randy Coleman said an outage along the Farrell/Hermitage/Wheatland border that affected about 250 customers around 3:30 p.m. Thursday wasn't related to the massive power outage. It was caused by a defective fuse holder that had been damaged by a recent lightning strike, Coleman said. The outage lasted only about 90 minutes.
Although Mercer County wasn't immediately affected by the larger blackout, there is a possibility that Penn Power customers could experience some temporary power losses as power plants come back online and service is restored across the power grid, Coleman said.
In large cities
First reported at 4:10 p.m., the massive, cascading outages interfered with homebound commutes on a hot summer day, forcing office workers to walk downstairs from high floors and halting New York City subway trains and Cleveland RTA trains.
Gov. Bob Taft declared a state of emergency in Cuyahoga County. Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell pleaded for water conservation because there was no electricity to pump water from Lake Erie, and she imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew for juveniles.
Cleveland and Erie hospitals went on emergency backup generators. All outbound flights were canceled at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, but incoming flights were allowed to land.
Electricity was restored in Toledo and parts of Akron within two hours and was beginning to return to Cleveland by early evening.
Despite increased call volume, SBC said its communications network continued to serve customers without interruption across its 13-state service area, but some telephone switching offices affected by power outages in Connecticut and parts of Michigan and northern Ohio were operating on backup power supplies.
SBC advises customers without electricity to use hard-wired phones because cordless and other phones requiring a power supply won't operate during a power failure.