The NE Ohio Tornados of 2024: An Increasingly Common American Story

And a salute to electrical workers everywhere

Last Tuesday afternoon, August 6, Hiroshima Day, four F-1 tornados touched down in northeast Ohio packing 110 mile-per-hour winds. They weaved and bobbed for several miles each, mainly knocking down hundreds of trees and power lines across parts of five counties. Luckily, as far as I know, no one died in a region where single tornados are uncommon and multiple ones a rarity.

The storm front knocked out power to almost half a million people, my family among them. To make a long story sort, after two nights with no power my wife and I, who are both in our 60s, decided the better part of valor was to find an air-conditioned hotel.

Unfortunately, most of the local hotels didn’t have power any more than we did, so I used the AAA website to find a room in Akron, maybe 30 miles away, reserved one at a Hilton Garden Inn, my wife picked me up from work and off we went.

We arrived and the place was filling up fast. The parking lot was full of large work pickups and vans. Inside, several dozen white men in ages from maybe 21 to 60 sat in the hotel restaurant or outside in the “Smoking Pavilion,” something I never saw in Ohio before recreational marijuana was legalized.

Emblazoned on their hats and and bright yellow or orange work shirts was IBEW.

The cavalry had arrived, or rather returned to their lodging after working over 12 hours restoring power in Cuyahoga County. They’d driven back, taken showers, and descended to eat and drink and unwind before getting up to do it all over again.

Most of them were from Kentucky and Tennessee. They’d just finished up in Texas, getting the lights turned back on there after they were knocked out by a tropical storm in the Houston area.

My wife noticed one young man, very Scots-Irish looking, with long auburn hair full of natural ringlets that would have made Audrey Hepburn envious. She said it was unfair for a man to have gorgeous hair like that.

Of course we talked to them, and they were all polite as they could be. We also had a good conversation with a gay married couple a little younger than us who were also power outage refugees. They live in a high rise apartment complex in a suburb just west of Cleveland.

The pattern repeated Saturday morning, then in the late afternoon the power in our neighborhood was restored and we returned home.

Needless to say, none of our perishable food had survived, and the trips to the grocery store began. I went to Marc’s this morning. My wife went to Giant Eagle this afternoon, and right next door, going into a large family restaurant which we frequent, were the same IBEW linemen we had seen in the hotel in Akron! She recognized the guy with the beautiful long hair and his crew.

I’m sure the restaurant gave them their very best. They more than earned it. As I write this, “only” 17,000 electric company customers are without power, which is a big improvement over the 392,000 last Tuesday. Talk about a job well done, and a positive example of what Americans can do. Thanks again, IBEW crews!

OTOH, this is also a story of declining and vulnerable infrastructure. Our oligarchy is unwilling to spend the money to bury our power lines wherever possible, which would make our electrical grid a lot less vulnerable every time the wind blows or the snow and ice accumulate.

It can be done. I understand Florida mostly did it, and if they can do it most of us can, but we won’t hear presidential candidates or the corporate state media talking about that, or a hundred other things that could be done to make America a better place to live.

So our demand for electricity will grow, the infrastructure will become only more vulnerable, and the IBEW crews will keep crossing the country to turn the lights back on yet again.

Thank you for reading, good night, and good luck.

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