Four days after the derecho — a windstorm the size of a hurricane — more than 20,000 homes and businesses still had no power at the end of last week, and crews worked through the weekend to restore power to the rest. Roseville got the worst of it and lost a neighbor to the flooding.
Half the staff in our office went more than three days without power. AEP Ohio President Mark Rider said more than 3,700 workers were out on the lines. Some carried gear into backyards on foot because a truck couldn't get near the pole.
People watched the road for those trucks. When one turned onto your street, it was the best thing you saw all week. Neighbors brought cold water out to the crews. Kids waved.
Then there was the phone. You called to report the outage, and a recording asked you to press a number. It told you it already knew. It gave you a time, and the time moved twice before morning. The text updates kept coming, and after a day or so they started to feel less like information than proof somebody still remembered you were out there.
These companies have communicating without saying anything down to a science.
That's the whole relationship, more or less. It's the way people used to talk about politics — everybody liked their own congressman and couldn't stand Congress. Same deal here. We like the crew, and we can't stand the company. Although after a week in the dark, some people hate everybody.
We've spent six months in these pages on why the bills keep climbing. Data centers are the answer everybody hands you, and they're part of it, but coal plants are closing across the region, and the cheap power they made isn't getting replaced fast enough. Less supply and steady demand only move a price one way.
The other part is the rate cases. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio approved two AEP Ohio increases on the same day in April, and the Ohio Consumers' Counsel said one of them was dressed up to look like a cut. Readers wrote in, mad about that. They should have.
The person on the pole in your yard at 2 a.m. isn't responsible for the weather and never had a thing to do with your rate. That gets decided at hearings in Columbus, in front of five commissioners the governor appoints, in a room most of us couldn't find with directions.
Those hearings are open, and the filings are posted online. The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel is the state office that represents residential customers, and it takes toll-free calls at 1-877-742-5622.
Hardly anyone bothers, and the companies with attorneys sitting in that room are counting on it staying that way.
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