Northeast Ohio residents are dealing with the aftermath of the severe storms that rolled through the region Tuesday.
More than 120,000 Ohioans lost power due to the storm according to Brooke Conlan, a spokesperson for FirstEnergy.
Around 22,000 FirstEnergy customers were still without power as of early Wednesday afternoon, most of them in Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lorain, Lake and Ashtabula counties.
Residents and business owners in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood said this was the third major power outage they’ve dealt with in the last couple months.
“We lost hundreds of pounds of product today in addition to all the revenue we're losing from not being open, and then on top of that, it's like we can't start working for all the prep we need to do for tomorrow until the power comes back on,” said Ian Herrington, owner of Leavened, a bakery in Tremont.
Herrington said he’s looking into switching electrical providers.
“FirstEnergy has a pretty bad reputation right now … I don't think they're doing right by the citizens of the state. I think that they're not putting the kind of money that they should be putting into keeping the infrastructure up, to hiring the right people to fix these kinds of situations,” Herrington said. “I think when this kind of stuff happens, I would imagine that the higher-ups at these power companies are saying, ‘Hey, it is what it is. Deal with it.’”
Wind gusts topped 70 miles per hour in some parts of the region, bringing down trees and power lines.
Neighbors in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood have different providers. One FirstEnergy customer lost power, and the storm knocked the power meter off of her house. The other, with Cleveland Public Power, did not lose power, but the storm caused a 30-foot tree to fall from her yard into the street.
“I heard a loud sound. It sounded like a transformer. I don't know what it was. It could have been lightning,” Lydia Rembert said.
Rembert said she’s been calling her insurance company and utility companies all day, trying to figure what to do with the tree, which also knocked down wires from a telephone pole.
“Back and forth, waiting it out,” Rembert said. “...It's driving me nuts.”
Several Cleveland Public Power customers lost power, but CPP said in a social media update that it resolved 75% of the outages from Tuesday’s storm by Wednesday afternoon.
Images of storm damage — fallen trees, broken wires and structural damage — from the region circulated around social media.
"We haven't really heard, thankfully, of structural damage, at least across portions of the Cleveland metro area,” said Salix Iverson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Cleveland, “but primarily the main reports we've been seeing are those trees and power lines that are down.”
Kenyatta Rox’s Old Brooklyn apartment suffered from roof damage. She said her roof started leaking Wednesday, but the building’s staff was quick to take of the issues.
“My daughter's friend was here and he was in disbelief that he was like, ‘The roof just fell off the building. It's all in the front yard,’” Rox said. “I’m like, ‘What? Facetime me. Show me.' I couldn't believe it.”
The storms were caused by a low pressure system moving through the area.
“Essentially there's a low-pressure system that was hovering across the lower Great Lakes region,” Iverson said. “Eventually, it swept far enough south in addition to a cold front across portions of the lower Great Lakes and upper Ohio Valley yesterday into this morning. ... so with that, we were able to warm up and destabilize enough yesterday afternoon for some strong to severe thunderstorms to develop along and ahead of that cold front.”
The National Weather Service detected several rounds of thunderstorms from the afternoon into the evening, according to Iverson, with varying amounts of rainfall across the region.
"One of our observing sites in Richmond Heights recorded 3.44 inches of rain, but we had plenty of sites measure anywhere from one and a half inches to three inches across most of the forecast area,” Iverson said.
Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Medina, Portage and Summit counties were all under a flood warning until 5:15 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.
“Given the increased chances for additional rainfall through today and even into parts of this week, these could be in effect for the meantime,” Iverson said.
While the National Weather Service issued two tornado warnings, teams are still determining whether any touchdowns occurred. Additional thunderstorms may take place through the weekend, Iverson said.
