LAKEWOOD, Ohio — If you live in Lakewood, you know power outages have become the new norm, and FirstEnergy isn't denying that it's a big problem that needs fixing.
RELATED: Power outages persist in Lakewood and Cleveland, prompting state action and public outcry
News 5 has been following the persistent power outages for months.
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio previously announced that, after receiving more than 800 complaints from residents, community leaders, and local officials, it launched a review and issued a formal notice of probable non-compliance to FirstEnergy.
PUCO believes the root of the problem is aging infrastructure, an issue it says has persisted for years with little action taken. PUCO found four potential violations and listed a number of required corrective actions, including: Submitting a detailed improvement plan and improving communication with customers.
On Monday, an attempt at better communication and transparency led to a town hall led by FirstEnergy.
The Lakewood Civic Auditorium was filled with about 100 frustrated residents.
"Tonight, we're here to really hear from our customers here in Lakewood. Unfortunately, the customers here in Lakewood, the surrounding areas have really experienced unacceptable amount of outages here in the last several months," FirstEnergy Vice President of Distribution Engineering and Planning, Sally Thomas said.
FirstEnergy unveiled a $12.5 million investment plan that will tackle equipment and monitoring. A breakdown of that includes:
- $5K+ towards transformer repairs and upgrades
- $4M towards transformer replacements
- $1.6M towards breaker replacements
- $6.9M towards smart meter installations
"We also have degree foresters out there looking for dead, diseased and dying trees to be more proactive with identifying those and getting those mitigated prior to them causing a system event," Thomas said.
Additional breakers will be set up in Lakewood, too, according to Thomas.
The plan comes after Thomas said FirstEnergy started seeing more outages in late 2024.
"We're now nearing the end of the summer this year, so why that gap in between knowing when the problem started and now figuring something out?" I asked Thomas.
She responded, "When everything started late November, we've been doing things to fix those issues as they happen. We're going to correct this issue. We have the money, we have the resources, we have the leadership's commitment to make sure they're making the right investments into the system and that ultimately here that we'll have better customer service for this community not just now but for years to come."
Thomas told me FirstEnergy has been flying drones around more recently to get a 360-degree view of some of the switching structures.
However, even during Monday night's town hall, there were power outages in four Lakewood areas: Clifton Park, Madison and Elbur avenues, Detroit Avenue and W. 87th Street, and Detroit and Beach avenues.
There were about 550 FirstEnergy customers impacted.
Thomas claims Lakewood's consistent power outages make the city an outlier, saying FirstEnergy is not seeing this issue in other areas of Northeast Ohio.
"We understand your frustration. You're rightly so frustrated and we're here to do better," Thomas said.
The big question many brought up at Monday's town hall: will this $12.5 million investment be enough to keep Lakewood residents out of the dark?
"I think we're gonna see a really good shift in terms of the improvement in the system here with this investment. That's really the goal, but there's always ongoing maintenance. There's ongoing needs for continuous improvement in our system. We're gonna always be looking for ways to continue, optimize our system, make it more reliable, more resilient, and so there'll be additional investments in future years. This is not it, but I think that this is going to really solve the issues that we're having right now as well as in the foreseeable future," Thomas said.
As of now, FirstEnergy is not planning an additional town hall for Lakewood residents.
Additionally, I asked about potential reimbursements for FirstEnergy customers who continue losing perishable goods to the many power outages.
"Every utility in the state has a tariff and that tariff is really the governing entity of how we run our utility. From that there's certain things that we can or cannot do for those governing laws but per our tariff, unfortunately, we're not allowed to do that," Thomas said.
FirstEnergy still recommends calling its customer service line to see if something changes.
"There may be other things that we can do. I think it's worth the conversation so we really encourage people to reach out to us. We wanna be communicative with the community. We want to be transparent with the community, letting them know what we can and cannot do because of the tariff, but also maybe there's other things we can do," Thomas said.
The $12.5 million plan is slated to be finished in 2027.
That investment will not be added to a customer's existing bill, as Thomas said it's already built into FirstEnergy's current budget.
