MENTOR, Ohio — First Energy repair crews have been working 16 hour shifts, after high winds knocked out power to 285,000 Northeast Ohio households on Feb. 24.
First Energy said there are now only about 4,000 homes without electric service.
Still, residents in the Mentor neighborhood on Links Road said they are still dealing with darkness, despite having a backyard transformer dangling on a broken utility pole in their backyards.
Some residents are using generators to provide basic heating and lighting in their homes, but some neighbors believe they should have been a priority because of the potentially hazardous transformer.
Jodee Cummings, and Mark O'Bannon told News 5 their street has been the subject of chronic outages and said First Energy has not been able to give them enough information as to when power will be restored.
Cummings said she told tree trimming crews this past summer that they missed cutting down critical tree limbs, that she believes caused the transformer to be dislodged during the wind storm.
"I called the Illuminating Company and I told them that they didn't cut the branches and they told me that I would have to file a complaint," Cummings said.
"Virtually all the neighbors have called and they just don't seem to respond anything, they tell us all the same thing."
O'Bannon told News 5 residents have reported the chronic power outages to Mentor City hall.
"We've had numerous power trips, in the last two years we had 50 trips on this street," O'Bannon said.
"Mentor is aware of it, we let the city manager, council president know, the forestry people."
"I've had them out on my end of the street, I'm at the other end of the street."
First Energy said it had to commit many crews to Mentor's Fairfax Elementary School over the past 48 hours.
It said it hopes to have electric pole replacement equipment on the scene, and power restored by 1 p.m. on Feb. 27.
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