LAKEWOOD, Ohio – The Lakewood City Council this week identified major shortcomings in the city’s response to the devastating August tornadoes that left hundreds of thousands of Northeast Ohio residents powerless for several days.
A lack of backup generators for both public and private buildings, such as community centers and high-rise apartment buildings, and the inability of some buildings to connect to a generator, left officials scrambling to meet the basic needs of the nation’s most vulnerable residents. city to provide.
Nearly 1,000 people were stranded in the high-rise Gold Coast apartments along Edgewater Road after a power outage left the buildings without a working elevator.
Lakewood also suffered the largest outages in cell phone coverage, and it took cell phone providers several days to provide the city with cell towers to restore phone service.
City officials are now exploring possible changes to the city’s building, housing and fire codes to require certain buildings to have the ability to plug in a generator, and whether the city should purchase its own cell phone towers and backup generators to avoid similar pitfalls in future storms. .
The revelations came during the meeting of the municipality’s Public Works and Sustainability Committee on Monday.
Councilman Tom Bullock said the purpose of the meeting was not necessarily to point the finger at anyone, but to better prepare the city for future catastrophic storms.
“The next time this happens, what is our plan so that Lakewood residents understand what the expectations are and what they need to do,” Bullock said.
Two Cuyahoga County officials – Office of Emergency Management Planning and Training Director Kevin Friis and Regional Cooperation Director Chris Alvarado – addressed the council.
The Council invited representatives from utility companies, including FirstEnergy and Verizon and AT&T, to the meeting.
The August 6 storm devastated the region, dropping five confirmed tornadoes in Lakewood, Rocky River, Parma, Bedford and other communities. Hundreds of thousands of residents were without power for days, and some suffered power outages for more than a week.
Lakewood’s acting fire chief Ryan Fairbanks said the department received 131 calls in the first eight hours during and after the storm. The city’s control room briefly lost power and two communications towers were damaged during the storm, at times hampering the department’s communications.
A tree was toppled in Lakewood after a series of catastrophic storms hit the region on August 5.Cory Shaffer, Cleveland.com
Friis said that when it came time for the county to look for generators for apartment buildings, many property managers didn’t know what capacity generator their buildings needed. And many of the buildings were older and not equipped with the necessary infrastructure to connect to a generator, Friis said.
City officials also requested cell phone companies to provide cell towers after the city experienced widespread coverage outages that left many residents unable to communicate and the city without a way to reach them with information.
The problem, says Friis, is that there are only a few dozen cell towers in the entire country. He said AT&T told the province the company has between 75 and 100 towers in total.
Alvarado called the lack of available cell phone towers “kind of a sin.”
“That’s something we might push for together at the state level, and really hold people accountable and say, ‘how do we make sure more of these are available,’” Alvarado said.
Councilman Kyle Baker suggested whether the city could require owners of the city’s taller buildings to install cell tower transponders that could provide additional capacity if some towers fail again.
Combining that proposal with new requirements for buildings to accept power from a generator could alleviate some of the shortcomings in the city’s preparation for the next round of generational storms, Baker said.
Friis said few communities have such laws on the books.
“But a number of cities are considering it after the storm,” he said.
