Ohio town's mayor says explosion at FirstEnergy plant preceded blackout
Originally published by the Cleveland Plain Dealer
Eastlake mayor says explosion at plant preceded blackout
08/17/03
James Ewinger and Sara Leitch
Plain Dealer Reporters
Eastlake Mayor Dan DiLiberto said the FirstEnergy Corp. generating plant in his city experienced an explosion Thursday approximately two hours before the largest blackout in North American history - though the Akron-based electric company denies it.
As national suspicions focus increasingly on northern Ohio as the cause of the massive power failure, DiLiberto is calling for a government investigation, adding his voice to a chorus of elected and appointed officials including U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and Alan Schriber, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
Kucinich, on the campaign trail in his bid for the presidency, said he "will withhold any statement about any actions we will take unless my staff investigation determines a link" to FirstEnergy. He did not withhold his suspicions, however.
"Why in the world would anyone think that poor maintenance is limited to Davis-Besse," Kucinich said yesterday. "Look at the sorry record of maintenance at Davis-Besse, resulting in a reactor with a hole in its head."
Davis-Besse has been shut since February 2002 after a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection turned up a large corrosion hole in the reactor's heavy carbon-steel lid.
"This utility has already threatened the Midwest with its maintenance and operation of a nuclear power plant," Kucinich said. He blamed deregulation of the electric power industry for redirecting the industry's attention from maintenance to cost-cutting, in part by neglecting necessary repairs and improvements.
However, Eastlake Mayor Dan DiLiberto said deregulation is not the culprit.
"It's because the system of delivering power has not been updated and is not in the best of shape," DiLiberto said. "Until it's fixed, there's going to be a problem and there's going to continue to be a problem."
The mayor said the explosion led to a release of fly ash that is supposed to occur at night and then, only when wind conditions are likely to carry it from local businesses and homes.
He called Thursday's fly-ash release "the largest I have ever seen," and said the timing was unusual. "I thought they pretty much had that under control," he said.
FirstEnergy has said the fly ash release was not that unusual and said there was no explosion.
More than 20 cars parked in the Eastlake Police Department parking lot about a half-mile from the plant were coated with ash, and were taken to a Rub and Scrub car wash on Vine Street for cleaning. FirstEnergy has an arrangement with the car wash to clean cars when the plant emits excessive ash, a police lieutenant said.
Actually, the ash takes the form of tiny brown pellets produced by the coal-fired generating plant on Lake Erie's shore.
"My daughter said it looked like a snowstorm in the middle of August," said Mary Beth Asenjo, 37, who arrived at her Keewaydin Drive home about 2 p.m. Thursday to find her driveway speckled with ash. "I was just glad my kids were inside." Her property abuts the FirstEnergy plant.
The plant vented ash three times Thursday afternoon, residents said, and coated about two dozen homes on Nakomis Road and Keewaydin with fly ash. Streets and driveways sported light brown tire tracks where cars had crushed the powdery pellets. Spider webs caught the ash as it fell. And anything that did not move was still gathering ash yesterday afternoon as the wind blew pellets from trees.
"I washed the cars yesterday, and already it's bad again," said Bob Horn, 20, who was spraying the roof of his parents' house to get rid of the ash residue. "Soon it'll start eating the paint."
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