LICKING COUNTY RESILIANT FOLLOWING SEVERE SUMMER STORM

Licking Countians Resilient Following Severe Summer Storm … The storm of June 29th has been characterized by meteorologists as a ‘super derecho’, however I think most of us will remember that Friday evening as ‘The Big Blow of 2012’. When emergency responders plan for such situations they typically plan for a multi-layered disaster situation and that is what we all experienced. Beginning with a severe straight line wind storm that traveled some 600-miles in 10-hours across several mid and eastern U.S. states, by 5:30pm Licking County saw extensive property damage, literally hundreds of tons of downed trees, impassable roads, and a heavily damaged power grid that threw a majority of residents into the dark. On top of that the final disaster layer was a severe weeklong heat wave. What next? The good news is the 170-thousand residents of Licking County are a resilient bunch and we survived the best ‘mother nature’ could throw at us. As a County Commissioner here I am proud of the thousands of heroes who in so many ways stood tall and did their part to assist in the recovery. Workers at the township, village, city and county level worked tirelessly to reestablish the roads and infrastructure. Residents of all ages and ability worked to help their neighbors and neighborhoods recover. Social service agencies quickly responded to the need. And the two local electrical utilities marshaled their forces and many others who came to assist to rebuild the power system in fairly short order. Frankly, we may be the only nation anywhere that can take that kind of a multi-state storm hit, with billions of dollars worth of damage, and basically recover as quickly as we have. Indeed there is plenty left to do from continuing to clean-up public and private property, repair of damaged structures, replenishing the supplies of the Food Pantry Network, and generally getting back to work and back to business as it was. However, we would also do well to take a moment and thank a higher power for allowing our county to survive this disaster without any storm related loss of life. A final thought on the quality of the power system. Usually after a wind or ice storm that causes outages, we hear the call for putting all of our power lines underground. We can’t afford the trillions of dollars to do that, and it doesn’t make practical or economic sense. In my view we should instead be reinvesting extensively in the above ground system, much of which is nearly a century old. There is often resistance to higher utility rates that would generate the many millions of dollars needed to update and enhance the above ground primary and secondary system. However, as a country, we can’t allow our power system to deteriorate and become third rate. It is time to update our transmission, substation and distribution systems. The other issue is the reluctance to allow the utilities to trim out their right of ways, both pruning and removing trees. In a windstorm such as that of June 29th the electrical grid would have survived to a much greater extent without tons of rotted and old trees falling apart and downing lines. Just like the capital improvements that are called for, it is time to remove trees that pose a great risk and start planting the next generation of shade trees away of the utility right of ways.