When Teresa Harshbarger and her family built their home outside of New Concord several years ago, they bought their water heater from Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative (GMEC). It came equipped with a radio-controlled switch that allows the cooperative to remotely turn off the heater to curtail electricity use during times of heavy demand. Though she says she’s sure the switch has been activated from time to time, she has never noticed when it happens.
Bridgewater Dairy, a family farm in Montpelier, Ohio, has 3,000 dairy cows that produce 30,000 gallons of milk daily. They also produce an estimated 15 million gallons of manure each year.
A decade ago, Chris Weaver, Bridgewater Dairy’s chief operating officer, started turning his farm’s animal waste into something valuable — electricity — by installing an anaerobic digester.
“I wanted to manage the animals’ manure with an eye to helping the environment,” Weaver says. “I also wanted to improve the comfort of my cows. An anaerobic digester lets me do both.”
Over the past decade, it has steadily grown to become the largest privately owned recreational shooting facility in the country. The numbers alone are impressive: Fifty-two trapshooting fields sit side by side, stretching a full mile, alongside 14 skeet fields, 14 pistol and rifle ranges, two sporting clays ranges, and an archery range.
Head to Splatter Park near Mt. Gilead on a crisp, fall day, or pre-spring, before trees bud, and you’ll almost always find at least a little company. By summer, though, you’ll join as many as 600 other paintball warriors at a time looking to splatter their foes.
Jeremy Warnimont and his cousin Jake, both linemen at Tricounty Rural Electric Cooperative, based in northwest Ohio, were coming home from a long day of training on transformer rigging near Columbus, when they saw a young girl flip her all-terrain vehicle (ATV) in a nearby field. The vehicle landed on top of her.
“She was trying to jump a dirt hill, but didn’t make it,” Jeremy says. “When I got to her, she was non-responsive. Jake called 911 and we stabilized her until the first responders arrived.”
At the beginning of March 2017, after what had been, to that point, an unusually mild winter, a huge storm system came through southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, bringing with it winds that brought down trees and power lines and causing power outages in large swaths of the area.
Electric cooperatives do everything they can — regular maintenance, tree-trimming, etc. — to prevent such outages, but sometimes, Mother Nature has her own ideas. When outages do happen, the co-ops are ready.
