Aiesha Motley has spent a year calling the city and FirstEnergy about the streetlights that are out on Greenwood Avenue in West Akron, where she lives. She and a neighbor from Sunset View Drive came to the Sept. 29 Ward 4 meeting with one question: When will the lights come back on?
Amy Hopkins, a local engagement specialist at FirstEnergy, spent most of the meeting at St. Sebastian Catholic Church answering questions about outages, tree trimming and streetlights.
When will Greenwood Avenue’s streetlights be fixed?
“What has happened is we’ve had some utility come in and cut into our streetlight lines,” Hopkins said. “It takes a second to actually find where the fault is, determine how much has to be replaced. I have my engineering department designing specifically Greenwood.”
FirstEnergy subsidiary Ohio Edison owns and maintains about 24,000 of the streetlights in Akron. The city owns an additional 2,000, mostly in the Great Streets neighborhoods.
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Faults are a disruption in the flow of electricity to the electric lines feeding the streetlights. They can be caused by physical cuts from construction equipment, tree roots, aging infrastructure, stripped copper wires and squirrels, among other factors…