Washington Electric Cooperative

Power's pain points

sbradford — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:04:52 +0000

Power's pain points

September 1, 2025

Larry Kelly remembers a time, from the late 1990s into the mid-2010s, when any strong wind could cause him to lose power at his home near Graysville for a couple of hours — or longer.

“When there was a more serious storm, outages of eight hours were typical, and that could happen once a month or more,” Kelly says. “I went out of town for a week one summer and there was a long outage. When I came home, my refrigerator was like a biosphere. I tried everything — including skunk spray — to get rid of the smell. It took a box of activated charcoal with a fan for a week to save my refrigerator.”

Kelly knew that personnel from his co-op, Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative, were doing everything they could to provide reliable power for him and all of his neighbors in that area of Monroe County. The problem was that many of the outages were occurring before electricity even reached the co-op’s substations.

Lost in transmission

The problem wasn’t a lack of power generation — the Cardinal Power Plant and other assets of Buckeye Power, the co-op-owned generating company that serves Ohio’s cooperatives, were producing plenty of electricity. And the problem usually wasn’t in the nearly 1,800 miles of Washington Electric’s lines that run from substations to members’ individual homes and businesses.

The problem lay in transmission, the movement of electricity between the power plant and the co-op along high-voltage lines that, for the most part in Ohio, are owned and maintained by investor-owned utility companies.

“Our local co-ops do their best to maintain their lines, but there are things that are beyond their control,” says Tom Schmidt, principal planning engineer for Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives, the statewide trade and service organization that includes Buckeye Power. “Unfortunately, when transmission goes out, you’re talking about a whole substation, so it’s hundreds and hundreds of co-op members affected. These outages often occur during snowstorms or ice storms — the worst possible times — and all the co-op can do is wait for transmission to come back.”

In Kelly’s case, Washington Electric was reliant at the time on West Virginia-based Monongahela Power, which showed little interest in maintaining or upgrading the transmission infrastructure in the corner of Ohio it served. When American Electric Power purchased Monongahela’s assets in 2005, it faced a daunting task.

“The transmission system was low-voltage and had become antiquated,” says Jeff Triplett, Washington Electric’s general manager. “It was very unreliable. Our substations were among the worst delivery points in the state, in terms of number and duration of outages. They affected 500 or 800 people at a time, and this went on for many years. It was very frustrating for our members.”

To complicate matters, that area of southeastern Ohio, including large chunks of the Wayne National Forest, is hilly, densely wooded, sparsely populated, and generally a difficult and expensive place to build transmission infrastructure. (Monroe County has been called “The Switzerland of Ohio” because of its rugged terrain, which may have attracted its early Swiss settlers.)

Reliability improves, at a cost

Washington Electric and Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives worked with AEP on an extensive plan to improve reliability. AEP would replace old 23-kilovolt transmission lines with new 138-kV lines, and they would be networked — providing the ability to backfeed electricity from another direction if one transmission line went out. Washington Electric would build new 138-kV substations to transfer power into its local distribution system.

This comprehensive rebuild required substantial investments — in time, effort, and money. AEP spent some $250 million on new transmission lines, replacing dilapidated wooden poles with durable steel structures. The costs for such upgrades are recouped through higher rates charged to consumers, Schmidt says. Those rates are federally regulated, and for the past 10 to 15 years, regulators have been granting rate increases that have made it feasible and even appealing for the investor-owned utilities to make such improvements.

Co-ops pass transmission charges through to members at cost, usually noted on electric bills within a generation and transmission, or G&T, line item. (The “G” portion goes to the electric producer — Buckeye Power for Ohio co-ops — and those rates have stayed relatively stable, Schmidt says.)

“Transmission cost is a real concern,” Triplett says. “It’s gone up astronomically, and members notice it on their bills. We’ve been lucky that we can say although those costs are going up, at least our members are seeing results. They notice the difference in improved reliability.”

Looking forward

The need for transmission infrastructure continues to grow, Schmidt says, driven by ever-increasing demand for electricity. That means transmission costs will keep growing as well.

Ohio’s electric cooperatives, both locally and through the statewide group, will continue to advocate for investments that help co-op members and rural areas — not just those that feed more data centers in central Ohio.

“We have several active projects in development,” Schmidt says. “A lot of times, we recognize costs are going up, but we know we stand to benefit greatly from those investments. We’re looking for the same success we had with Washington Electric, and applying it elsewhere.”

Larry Kelly, for one, appreciates the improved reliability to the remote area he calls home.

“Today, outages are so doggone rare,” he says. “I’m very appreciative of how far they’ve come and how good the service is today.”

Transmission in transition

Although the topography around Firelands Electric Cooperative in New London — plains that are friendly to corn and soybean fields — may not be as rugged as the forested hills around Washington Electric, Firelands has also experienced transmission troubles.

“For about 50 years, we had about half of our substations, serving 60% of our members, on transmission lines that dead-ended at one of our substations,” says Don Englet, Firelands’ general manager. Such “radial feeds” lack a loop connecting to an alternate transmission source, so if the incoming line goes down, everyone on the substation loses power.

Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives’ power transmission group negotiated with transmission provider First Energy to loop one substation to another in 2019, providing a two-way feed to about 40% of members. But the co-op’s largest substation, in New London, was still on a radial feed with no backfeeding option. “If we lost that transmission feed, 1,800 members were left in the dark,” Englet says.

In June of 2023, that feed was off for nearly 47 hours. “We communicate with members that although we own the generation of electricity (through Buckeye Power), we don’t own the transmission,” Englet says. “But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for them when the power is out.”

So Firelands and OEC negotiated with First Energy and AEP, which were working to interconnect their transmission systems, to place the tie point at the co-op’s New London substation. Once the project is complete, the station will have transmission feeds from both companies, so if one goes out, the other can still provide service.

“This will benefit us tremendously,” Englet says. “We’ve seen improvements on our northern substations since 2019, and this will be another huge boost for reliability.”

What is a G&T?

When most co-op members in Ohio look at their electric bills, they may note a charge for generation and transmission — separate from what they pay the co-op to build, maintain, and manage local distribution of electricity. It’s usually a significant portion of the bill.

But where does it come from?

Electric cooperatives in Ohio collectively own and are members of Buckeye Power, a generation and transmission cooperative, or G&T, they formed in 1959 to get them the power that keeps their members’ lights on.

While some of the country’s 64 G&Ts both generate and transmit the power they deliver to their member co-ops, others may simply purchase wholesale power on the open market and/or pay to use high-voltage transmission systems owned by others to deliver it.

Buckeye Power owns ample generation resources — the coal-fired Cardinal Power Plant, two natural gas peaking plants, and a variety of renewable sources — to produce plenty of reliable power and at the same time keep it as affordable as possible.

“We have sufficient generation to meet members’ needs now and in the foreseeable future, even with the significant load growth we’re expecting,” says Craig Grooms, president and CEO of Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives (the statewide organization that includes Buckeye Power). “Owning and operating our own generation, depending on ourselves rather than external suppliers, allows us to control that part of our costs, for the most part, and insulates us from a lot of price volatility.”

The G&T’s power delivery group then works with companies that own the high-voltage lines in the state to coordinate transmission of that power to the local distribution co-ops.

That’s where co-op members have seen the most significant increases in their bills lately.

Ohio’s transmission infrastructure is mostly owned by investor-owned utilities like AEP, First Energy, AES, and Duke Energy, which charge transmission fees. (A few local co-ops in the state own some transmission lines as well.)

“We arrange for transmission service, buying capacity on the transmission grid,” Grooms says. “In return, we expect good operations, good service, and good reliability, and we make sure those partners are fulfilling their obligations.”

At the same time, Grooms says, co-ops advocate for transmission improvements when they’re needed. “Obviously, those upgrades cost money,” he says. “We recognize that some of the investments that benefit co-op members most will result in higher transmission costs.”

It’s important to note that, just like each of Ohio’s 24 local distribution co-ops, Buckeye Power is a not-for-profit entity.

“The ‘G’ and the ‘T’ are provided at cost,” Grooms says. “When that shows up on members’ bills, it’s a straight pass-through. There’s no mark-up and no profit for the co-op.”

Tags

transmission

power generation

Washington Electric Cooperative

Firelands Electric Cooperative

Buckeye Power

Why am I a member?

sbradford — Tue, 30 May 2023 15:14:34 +0000

Why am I a member?

June 1, 2023

Jeff McCallister

Power Lines

Emily Bania has been a member of an electric cooperative for as long as she can remember. Growing up around Belle Valley, she and her family were members of Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative.

When she married her husband, Matthew, they moved to their place between Pleasant City and Sarahsville, in northern Noble County, where they still live with their kids, Kora and Lane. They have remained members of Washington Electric for the past 10 years. “It’s just what we’ve always had,” Emily says. “We’ve always just appreciated being members. We know several people who work for the co-op, including one of our neighbors, who’s a lineman. They’re always friendly and helpful and I haven’t given it much thought past that.”

Emily’s story is typical for co-op members. They get their electricity from, and pay their bills to, one of Ohio’s 25 electric distribution cooperatives; usually vote in the election for the co-op’s board of directors; and maybe attend the annual meeting of members. They might even get capital credits in the form of a check or a bill credit at the end of the year when the not-for-profit co-op’s revenues outpace its expenses.

It’s also typical for members not to think much about why their home or business gets electricity from a cooperative and not from one of the investor-owned utilities that operate in Ohio.

Co-ops, in fact, only came into being because the large, for-profit electric companies had no interest in stringing power lines out to farms and other rural areas — there was little or no profit to be made from doing so.

So, the farmers did it themselves. Thanks to the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act back in the mid-1930s, funding became available for local co-ops to form and build out the infrastructure needed to turn on the lights on farms and in hamlets that were ignored by the power companies.

The first electric cooperative pole in the nation, in fact, was set by Piqua-based Pioneer Electric Cooperative in 1935, when only one out of every 10 rural Ohio farms and homes was electrified. By June of 1937, more than 36 percent of rural Ohio had electricity, and by 1950, it was almost 100 percent.

There have been as many as 57 distribution cooperatives in Ohio since that time. Through mergers or attrition, 25 still operate within the state. (West Virginia’s one co-op is a member of Ohio’s Electric Cooperatives, which provides shared services such as Ohio Cooperative Living magazine; Michigan-based Midwest Energy and Communications serves 1,000 members in northwestern Ohio.) Click here to view a map and list of Ohio's 25 electric cooperatives.

The co-ops determined the areas they’d serve when they formed, mostly based on geography and whether service was available from anyone else. Those territories remained mostly constant, though they were not legally defined. The situation led to some areas of overlapping service, which not only created confusion and safety issues, for example, for first responders arriving on an accident scene, but made it difficult for the utilities to plan for future growth.

Then in 1978, co-ops banded together to push the Ohio Legislature to pass House Bill 577, which defined service territories and mandated the Public Utilities Commission to certify the areas where each electric provider in the state has both the obligation and exclusive right to provide electric service. The legislation protected both co-ops and consumers, who could no longer be denied service for simple reason of convenience to the electricity provider. With the publication of the PUCO map, all co-ops, municipal systems, and investor-owned companies were granted specific, legally defined, and agreed-upon areas they serve. Co-ops serve about 400,000 homes and businesses in areas within 77 of Ohio’s 88 counties.

Service territories remained unchanged in the 1990s despite the deregulation that allowed competing energy providers to supply electricity to consumers through energy choice; co-ops and municipalities were specifically exempted. The PUCO’s regulatory authority does not extend to either government-run municipalities or member-run cooperatives.

And while that history is nice, members like the Bania family are just happy the place they live happens to be served by a co-op. “When our power was out for a couple of days during that winter storm a while back, we would watch our neighbor go out at all hours to get people reconnected,” Emily says. “He kept checking on us because he knew it might be a while and wanted to make sure we were OK. I can’t imagine you get that with the bigger companies.”

Service territory FAQs

What is a service territory?

Electric certified territories (ECTs), often called “service areas” or “service territories,” are geographic regions where an electric company — which may be either an investor-owned utility or a rural electric cooperative — has the obligation and exclusive right to provide electric service. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is the authority regarding ECTs, and you can view the PUCO’s interactive map of ECTs here.

What’s the difference between my co-op and an investor-owned utility?

Investor-owned utilities are business organizations that are intended to be profitable. An electric cooperative is a not-for-profit, member-owned utility that provides electric service solely to its members. Each cooperative has its own unique set of bylaws and is governed by a board of directors elected from and by the members of the co-op. Nationally, more than 800 distribution cooperatives serve about 56% of the U.S. land area and more than 21.5 million homes, schools, businesses, and farms.

Why does the PUCO not regulate cooperatives?

The PUCO does not have jurisdiction over electric cooperatives and municipalities by the definitions of a “Public Utility” as defined in 4905.02 of the Ohio Revised Code, which states that an electric company that operates its utility not for profit, or that is owned and operated by any municipal corporation, is not included.

Tags

Washington Electric Cooperative

Pioneer Electric Cooperative

co-op member

co-op history

Filling the void

sbradford — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 14:39:21 +0000

Filling the void

May 1, 2022

Ohio Cooperative Living

Power Lines

Anyone living in a rural area of Ohio knows there’s a problem with internet service. Unlike in Hamilton County, for example, where nearly every single household has access to service of at least 100 megabits per second, only about a third of households in Vinton County can get even 25 Mbps — and one out of four can’t even get 10.

There are similar black holes of broadband all over Ohio — and of course, the factor they all have in common is their rural location, so it makes sense that electric cooperatives will play a role in rural broadband deployment.

The need for speed

Lack of high-speed internet access affects students’ ability to learn, individuals’ ability to work, and businesses’ ability to prosper, because every day the world is becoming more digital. Online classes, remote work, and Zoom meetings are becoming more and more the norm, and without broadband, those digital tools are simply unavailable.

There can be no doubt that electric cooperatives will play a part in bridging that digital divide.

“Part of our mission statement is to ‘improve the quality of life for our members and community,’ and broadband would undoubtedly do just that,” says Jeff Triplett, general manager of Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative. “Right now, too many people in rural areas, a great many of whom are members of electric cooperatives, are being left behind because of the lack of affordable high-speed internet.”

State and federal governments have recognized the problem and have recently enacted measures to ensure that more Ohioans — particularly those who are likely to be served by electric cooperatives — are afforded an on-ramp to the information superhighway.

The newly formed BroadbandOhio Office will oversee state and federal funds designed to make deployment of rural broadband more affordable.

Ohio-based telecommunications companies now have access to nearly $400 million in state and federal funding to deploy broadband to the state’s unserved and underserved areas, and the recently passed federal infrastructure bill designates an additional $65 billion for high-speed internet in rural areas around the country. The Biden administration’s proposed 2023 budget would add $150 billion in funding that could provide grants and low-interest loans to help with costs of bringing broadband to rural areas.

The exact parts that each of Ohio’s not-for-profit, member-owned co-ops play in expanding broadband coverage will depend on the individual co-op — each of which is best-positioned to determine exactly what part it can and should play in the solution.

Where co-ops can help

First and foremost, electric cooperatives own the poles that internet providers need to use to run the necessary fiber optic lines to their members. In many cases, however, those poles are likely to need an upgrade in order to carry the extra lines safely.

“Because of the state and federal money that’s now flowing in, we’re definitely seeing an uptick in requests to attach to our poles,” says Todd Ware, general manager at The Energy Cooperative in Newark. “We’re committed to speeding up the process to determine which poles need to be replaced, and to getting the new poles up as quickly as possible — it’s especially helpful that telecommunications companies now have access to funds to pay for the upgrades.”

Triplett and Washington Electric secured a grant to upgrade more than 200 miles of the co-op’s main-line electrical routes so they’re ready for commercial internet providers to deploy fiber optic cable in that part of Appalachian Ohio, where the largest gaps exist.

Studies at one Ohio co-op showed that the co-op could tackle the problem itself. Consolidated Cooperative, with offices in Delaware and Mount Gilead, has offered diversified services, including natural gas and propane along with electricity, for decades, and co-op management was able to lean on that experience in its ongoing efforts to bring retail broadband to its members. “There’s no doubt our experience providing other diversified businesses paved the way for the cooperative to provide retail broadband service,” says Consolidated CEO Phil Caskey. “There are clear rewards for our members who now have service and for all our members who now benefit from the robust communications system we’ve had for our electric system for the last 10 years.”

Co-ops get creative, collaborative

Other co-ops, however, have studied various solutions to mitigate some of the risk, and have determined their best solution is to secure strategic partnerships with telecommunications companies to bring broadband service to their members. Butler Rural Electric Cooperative, based in Oxford, has partnered with Cincinnati Bell to expand the Bell fiber network to co-op members in Butler and Hamilton counties. “We’re fortunate to have a willing partner right next door who shared our goals,” says Butler CEO Tom Wolfenbarger. “We know that doesn’t exist everywhere.”

Even if they’re not able to provide the service, most co-ops are doing other work to help pave the way for it. At North Western Electric Cooperative in Bryan, co-op crews are connecting all of the co-op’s electric substations with a loop of fiber optic line. For now, that line improves outage and other communications, but the co-op took the opportunity to install enough capacity in those lines to be ready for broadband expansion in the future.

Most co-ops have at least explored possibilities and done the extensive research necessary to be able to make informed decisions about getting broadband to their members .

“We know there is a need for service,” says Ed VanHoose, general manager of Wellington-based Lorain-Medina Rural Electric Cooperative and Attica-based North Central Electric Cooperative. “That’s why we will continue to investigate, evaluate, and review every avenue possible until our members have the same access that urban communities have had for years.”

Tags

Washington Electric Cooperative

The Energy Cooperative

Consolidated Cooperative

Butler Rural Electric Cooperative

North Central Electric Cooperative

Lorain-Medina Rural Electric Cooperative

North Western Electric Cooperative

broadband

Key to reliability

sbradford — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 15:12:34 +0000

Key to reliability

January 1, 2022

Jeff McCallister

Power Lines

Judy Mercer was just sitting down with her family — all 16 of them — for Thanksgiving dinner in 2014 when the lights in their house near Wingett Run suddenly went dark.

Judy and her husband, Larry, and their grown kids and their families — most in the group are members of Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative — just rolled with it. They lit some candles and got right on with their meal, and power eventually was restored sometime in the middle of the night. Then, almost exactly a month later, on Christmas Eve, the family had gathered once again for dinner when it happened again. This time, the lights stayed off until well into the next day.

“I’ve lived in the country my whole life, so honestly, I’m used to it,” Judy says. “We were actually thankful because we knew that there were linemen already out working on the problem even by the time we called it in, but that was when we got our generator.”

That area in and around Wayne National Forest in northeastern Washington County had long suffered from the least reliable electric power of any electric cooperative territory in Ohio, and the main reason is that the AEP transmission lines that bring electricity into the area dated back to the very beginning of Washington Electric in 1940.

“So much of the old infrastructure that was put in place right as electrification was first coming to rural areas — you can just imagine those folks saying, ‘This equipment will last for the next 50, 60, 70 years,’” says Tom Schmidt, principal planning engineer for Buckeye Power, the cooperative that generates and delivers the electricity to Ohio’s distribution cooperatives. “Well, that was 80 years ago. Those poles and lines are not only coming of age, but much of the system is also actually well beyond the end of its useful life, and it needs to be replaced.”

Three-legged stool

Most people who think even a little about their electricity probably understand two of the components involved in lighting their homes. Co-op members see the distribution part every day when they look at the lines coming from the poles to their homes. Those who have toured the Cardinal Plant certainly understand generation, or the production of electricity. Ohio cooperatives own their distribution network as well as the generation station.

It’s the third component, transmission, that is least noticed or understood — even though it’s such a significant portion of every electric bill. Other utilities own the transmission lines, and cooperative members pay to use the services from that network.

“Transmission is the way that the electricity gets from the power plant to the local cooperatives’ facilities. The co-op then distributes that power to individual homes and businesses,” Schmidt says. “It’s supplied from outside companies like AEP, FirstEnergy, Dayton Power and Light, and Duke. Buckeye Power and the co-ops are in constant contact with all of those companies to advocate for better reliability and fair rates.”

Well more than half of the outage minutes here are because of transmission issues. Those are the really memorable outages where half the county is dark and power doesn’t come back on for a long time.

“When the power goes out, most folks will think it’s because a squirrel got into a transformer or something like that, within the distribution system,” says Ben Wilson, Buckeye Power’s director of power delivery engineering. “But Ohio electric cooperatives report that well more than half of the outage minutes here are because of transmission issues. Those are the really memorable outages where half the county is dark and power doesn’t come back on for a long time.”

Addressing the need

That was the case for the outages at the Mercer family’s holiday celebrations a few years ago. The substation that delivered power to their part of the county was at the end of an old and failing transmission line that Buckeye Power had been lobbying for years to have upgraded.

“Unfortunately, upgrading is never a simple matter of just running a new line,” Schmidt says. “The poles that carried the line have to be replaced, and the service upgraded and voltage standardized — a lot of technical stuff — along with all the paperwork, acquiring new land or leases, conforming to regulations that had changed completely since those lines first went up. In heavily forested and hilly terrain like that, it’s not unheard of for new transmission upgrades to cost $3 million for every mile of line.”

Federal regulatory agencies have begun recognizing the need for improved transmission and have begun to update rules to make it more attractive for companies to make the kind of significant investments that are needed.

AEP transmission recently completed an 18-mile stretch of new power lines in and around Wayne National Forest, and work is underway for 25 more. Judy Mercer says that since the upgrade, the widespread power outages that used to happen so regularly have become a rarity.

“Buckeye Power uses outage data to influence decisions on where those investments are taking place,” Schmidt says. “We can be a squeaky wheel when we need to be, and we’re able to come in and say, ‘Hey, we know you’re going to be spending a lot of money, so how about spending it in these places where our members are receiving substandard service?’ We’ve been pretty successful getting them to agree.”

Reliability comes at a price

Of course, those upgrades have a price. “Even in the best circumstances, no one ever loves getting an electric bill, but that’s especially so when it keeps going up,” Schmidt says. “Right now, those increases are almost entirely because of transmission upgrades.”

“Transmission increases are universal and have affected all electricity users — not only our members, but customers of AEP, Duke Energy, FirstEnergy, DP&L,” Wilson says. “We work hard to make sure that cooperative members see the benefits of those investments.”

Buckeye Power, from its outset, has been committed to balancing affordability and reliability. The co-ops realize that the transmission improvements have had an impact on their members’ bills, but there’s no question those upgrades are significantly improving reliability. Buckeye Power’s staff will continue to advocate for improvements that benefit electric cooperative members, who often live in areas that need them most.

“Every electric distribution cooperative in the state has its own No. 1 transmission reliability concern, and we try to get in front of everyone’s No. 1,” Wilson says. “In some cases, that means small improvements that go a long way. Some, like Washington’s, are colossal in scope — and there are a couple more like it that are lining up. But there’s always a new No. 1, and as long as transmission companies are spending the money, we’re just going to keep picking them off the list.”

Tags

Washington Electric Cooperative

power generation

power delivery

A man and his castle

aspecht — Mon, 03 May 2021 17:49:09 +0000

A man and his castle

May 3, 2021

Randy Edwards

Co-op People

It stands to reason that a man who has made his living battling termites might choose not to build his house of wood. But Bill Grizer, an exterminator from Whipple, Ohio, and a member of Marietta-based Washington Electric Cooperative, wanted no ordinary house made of bricks or stone, either. He dreamed of a castle.

Today, Grizer Castle sits on high ground on Scotts Ridge in Washington County, occupying a site with a defensive position any medieval lord would covet. Polished suits of armor guard the entrance, and the castle’s Great Hall echoes with the joyous sounds of weddings — or it did, before the great plague recalling the Middle Ages temporarily shut down mass revelry.

With towers rising 50 feet above its hilltop foundation, Grizer Castle is the concrete manifestation of a dream that was inspired, as many are, by Hollywood. As an 8-year-old, Grizer was fascinated by the 1968 film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and his obsession with castles was launched while watching Dick Van Dyke pilot his flying car over Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein Castle.

Many 8-year-old boys would have fixated on the flying car; Grizer got all wide-eyed about the castle (built by Bavarian monarch “Mad” King Ludwig II in the 19th century). Grizer remembers, “I told my mom, ‘I want that castle!’ ” His mother replied in a way that every mother responds to her son’s pipe dream. “She said, ‘Well, you can’t have that castle, but if you work hard and save your money, you can build your own.’ I decided I would do that.”

Demonstrating a focus not typical among preadolescent boys, Grizer didn’t forget his dream. “I’d see someone was tearing down a house or building something and I’d say, ‘I’m Billy Grizer and I’m going to build a castle.’ They would laugh and give me some of their blocks. My mom was good about it. We had a Ford Maverick and she’d drive me around. We could fit maybe six or eight blocks in the trunk.”

Grizer, now 56, kept dreaming throughout high school, choosing a masonry program at the local trade school so he could develop his construction skills. While he earned his living as an exterminator — building his own company from the ground up over three decades — he never stopped collecting building materials and never stopped dreaming.

He added towers and a stone front to the home in which he and his wife raised their six children. But adding a castellated façade to a suburban-style home just wasn’t enough.

In 2014, Grizer’s castle in the sky began to take shape on 80 acres of family-owned land about 20 miles from Marietta. He’s both a licensed contractor and blessed with friends in the skilled trades, and the structure rose slowly, built entirely by Grizer and his friends and family. Friend Jamie Littleton and brother-in-law Jason Myers helped him with laying 46,000 concrete blocks. An electrician friend, Lonnie Kramer, helped him wire the place. Sons and daughters chipped in labor, and his wife, Barbara, used 11,412 small tiles to create a mosaic in the Great Hall showing the forces of good and evil battling in full armor on horseback. His sister, Sarah Myers, manages rentals and marketing.

Sometimes, Grizer’s friends also helped him keep his imagination in check. He points to the gleaming wooden ceiling of the hall and admits that it pained him to cut through it to install modern lighting. “My buddy said, ‘You’re not going to be able to hang burning torches inside this place,’ and he was right,” Grizer says.

The castle, when finished, will encompass about 26,000 square feet of usable space, including the Great Hall, which seats 300. Guests pass through iron gates and a foyer guarded by suits of armor before entering the Great Hall. Off the hall is a warming kitchen, restrooms, and a bridal suite complete with a grilled speakeasy door that allows the bride or her attendants to look out without being revealed.

The second-floor living areas, where he and his wife plan to settle down to enjoy retirement, remain unfinished, but will include a library and a bedroom with a sweeping view of the surrounding hills and valleys.

Always the dreamer, Grizer doesn’t plan to stop when the castle is complete. He imagines the surrounding land developed as a medieval entertainment attraction, including a working historical village, rustic camping cabins, and hiking trails.

“I want this place to be shared by the community,” Grizer says, standing in front of his castle and surveying his estate. “I want people to come out here with their kids, so they can see that the world can be yours — that you can have anything you dream of.”

Tags

Washington Electric Cooperative

Shipwreck: The U.S.S. Shenandoah

hgraffice — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 12:25:28 +0000

Shipwreck: The U.S.S. Shenandoah

August 30, 2018

Craig Springer

Features

The notion seems so fanciful: A U.S. Navy ship sinks in Ohio, not in Lake Erie or the Ohio River, but over the Appalachian piedmont of Noble County. It was a rural, bucolic setting — a patchwork of woodlots and farm fields split by fence lines and hedgerows and narrow roads with curves that followed the contours of the hillsides.

And the sky! An ocean blue that seemed meant for sailing — this, after all, is not a maritime tale, but rather, an aviation story.

The U.S.S. Shenandoah, a massive, 680-foot-long cigar-shaped Navy dirigible with 43 crew members aboard, was ripped apart and pulled to the ground early in the morning of Sept. 3, 1925, after the trip turned sour somewhere about a mile above the earth.

Fourteen of those sailors died in service to our nation. One of the deceased included a native son from Greenville: the ship’s commander, Zachary Lansdowne. Warrant Officer Raymond Cole, from Lima, Ohio, was among the injured.

The Shenandoah was the first rigid zeppelin brought into military service in the U.S. She had been christened two years earlier — the first ship of that type to be held aloft by lighter-than-air helium, rather than by hydrogen.

Shenandoah‘s normal duty was to scout the U.S. coastline, keeping watch for potential invaders. But that last fateful mission was a public relations stunt — meant to show off the Navy’s abilities at a series of carnivals and fairs.

Weather data from that day, archived by the National Weather Service, had given no one much pause to think that anything might be amiss. Granted, weather forecasting and climate observation were not as advanced as they are today, but observations revealed that the ship sailed into a nearly cloudless sky, with temperatures teasing into the low 80s. No winds of significance were recorded.

But, as happens in Ohio, a fierce summer squall rose seemingly from out of the blue. Its gale-force winds and alternating series of powerful updrafts and downdrafts ripped the Shenandoah into three parts, sending it crashing in three places. Cables snapped, metal twisted, and sheathing tore from the structure. The control car carrying the commanding officers split from the belly, and the men inside were crushed upon impact with the soil. The other parts descended slower, but no less dangerously.

Indiana resident Jerry Copas, 30-plus years a balloonist, has had a lifelong fascination with the Shenandoah. “I first read about the ship in second grade,” he says, “and it was like, ‘Wow — I have to learn more.'”

Indeed he has, culminating in a richly illustrated book, The Wreck of the Naval Airship USS Shenandoah, which draws on the private collections and recollections of Noble County residents and the U.S. Navy. The book tells, in rich detail, the complete story of the Shenandoah and her crew and the Ohio communities that had to deal with the aftermath of the crash.

In the immediacy, Noble County residents turned out in droves to see the airship that was, end to end, bigger than two football fields long. Folks pilfered the lightweight duraluminum and sheathing. Some just gawked.

Photos held in the U.S. Navy archives and those published in Copas’s book show men and women, and notably few children, milling about. Some pose with the novelty of the airship behind them. Others express a candid disbelief and amazement that this thing of twisted metal fell out of the pre-dawn sky. Also telling are the soldiers with their rifles at the ready in some of the images, there to cease the looting and protect the Navy’s property.

The affair naturally spawned inquiries as to how and why the ship sank and men died. “Lansdowne opposed the mission over the Midwest, specifically because of the erratic summer weather,” says Copas. “I have studied him so much, I feel like I know him. He was the model of devotion to duty and he gave his last full measure. He followed orders and followed them all the way to the ground. It was sadly a lot of wasted resources in time and treasure and blood.”

Craig Springer is a freelance writer who grew up in Ohio.

Today, the Noble Local School District, which serves the area where Shenandoah crashed and is served by Washington Electric Cooperative, has named its elementary, middle, and high schools after the ship. Their sports teams are named “The Zeps.”

Tags

Ohio history

Weather

Washington Electric Cooperative