Many woke up earlier this month caught off guard by the several inches of wet snow that fell overnight while they snoozed away.
Brian Kolts and Tom Workoff were not surprised at all.
They saw the snow coming days away.
This is just the type of devious weather they dread.
Wet sticky snow wreaks havoc on power lines causing them to either droop and touch tree limbs or topples trees onto the lines resulting in widespread power outages.
Tucked away in a second-floor office in FirstEnergy’s large office building off White Pond Drive in Akron, the meteorologists spend their days poring over all sorts of technical weather data to spot potential trouble. They also help with the company’s various environmental technical data.
Large screens cover one wall.
One tracks the precipitation.
Another the cloud cover.
One screen is covered with numbers that show the current wind speeds.
There are large circles and lines on yet another monitor that shows the latest forecast weather models.
FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin said some wonder why a utility would want to have its own meteorologists on staff.
A simple answer is the scope of territory the Akron-based utility and its various monikers cover.
The company’s power lines touch six states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, West Virginia, Maryland and New York — encompassing some 65,000 square miles from the Ohio/Indiana border to the New Jersey shore and the Great Lakes down to the mountains of West Virginia.
There are some 6 million customers — including 2 million in Ohio alone — who rely on the company to make sure the coffee pot turns on in the morning and there’s light to brush their teeth by at night.
So when Mother Nature is brewing up weather mayhem, Durbin said, it is critical that they are able to muster crews to respond and fix issues along the company’s more than 24,500 miles of transmission lines which help connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. FirstEnergy’s utilities also have more than 273,000 miles of distribution lines that run along residential streets.
The area is so expansive that it crosses 11 different National Weather Service offices each with different warning areas so it would be maddening to try to keep track of it all.
“We can have a wind event, snow, freezing rain and severe thunderstorms all going on at once in the same day,” Kolts points out.
Take Northeast Ohio for example, Chardon can be getting hammered by wet, heavy lake effect snow while it is bright and sunny at the FirstEnergy campus in Akron.
Throw in the varying terrain of all the states FirstEnergy touches from mountain ranges to the East Coast shoreline, Workoff said, it can make for some fairly interesting times.
“You wouldn’t be a meteorologist if something did not surprise you,” said Workoff, who once worked at a Buffalo-area TV station and spent a couple years with the National Weather Service.
So don’t ask them whether you should grab an umbrella before heading out, the focus for these two is ominous weather that could spell trouble for FirstEnergy workers and customers.
While the company’s power transmission lines can be pretty resilient, there are some things that can cause outages.
They include:
• Winds as high as 40 mph and above
• Freezing rain that accumulates at least a quarter of inch
• Prolonged 90-degree days with overnight lows in the 70s or above
• Heavy wet snow
• Solar flares that could create spikes along the lines
• Lightning strikes
The goal is to be not caught off guard. At the first hint of potential trouble, the company summons the various leaders at its power companies together for a conference call to discuss the storms with the meteorologists.
The number of people on the conference call can number as high as 100, particularly in the case of a large storm like a hurricane along the East Coast that can spawn high winds and storms as far away as here in Ohio.
“It can get pretty busy in here,” said Kolts, who was a meteorologist in the Air Force and once worked in Bermuda.
The goal, Durbin said, is to keep employees safe and the power on.
Kolts pointed out there are times they will also track storms that will miss the FirstEnergy territory but will impact the company because its crews will have to be dispatched to help out fellow utilities thanks to longstanding mutual aid agreements.
Of all the types of weather possible on any given day, the one FirstEnergy fears the most is a derecho — a widespread line of fast-moving damaging winds or severe thunderstorms that cover hundreds of miles over a long period of time.
Kolts can rattle off the date of the last one FirstEnergy had to contend with as easy as remembering a child’s birthday or a wedding anniversary.
June 29, 2012.
The storm caused some $2.9 billion in damages, including flattening giant FirstEnergy power transmission towers and putting tens of thousands of customers in the dark — some for as long as three weeks.
This was followed a few months later by Superstorm Sandy — the second costliest such storm in history causing $75 billion in damage.
“That was a horribly busy time for us,” he said. “I don’t want to go through that again.
“It was a tough year for us.”
Craig Webb can be reached at cwebb@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3547.