Severe morning storms tore through North Royalton on Monday, knocking out power to roughly 3,000 residents — about a fifth of the city — as downed lines and snapped tree limbs spread across Northeast Ohio. City officials confirmed crews from the local utility were already working to restore service by midday, even as the outage became just one piece of a much larger regional blackout.
The North Royalton Police Department said in a statement posted to Facebook that a large section of the city lost power due to the morning's storm, affecting roughly 3,000 residents, according to the North Royalton Police Department. FirstEnergy's online outage portal showed 3,055 of the city's 15,272 customers without power, putting the impact at close to 20 percent of the municipality, per FirstEnergy. Power in North Royalton is delivered by The Illuminating Company, a FirstEnergy subsidiary that serves more than 700,000 customers across Northeast Ohio.
Mayor Presses Utility as Crews Scramble
North Royalton Mayor Paul Marnecheck, who previously served as city council president before taking the city's top office, contacted FirstEnergy directly as the outage unfolded, according to the police department's statement. FirstEnergy told residents its crews had been dispatched to investigate the cause and restore power, and that they were en route to affected areas Monday. Residents experiencing an outage were directed to report it by calling 1-888-LIGHTSS or through FirstEnergy's online outage-reporting page.
The North Royalton outage was a small piece of a far larger storm event. Morning storms knocked out power to more than 33,000 customers across Northeast Ohio, with Cuyahoga County alone logging 22,605 outages by midday, as reported by WKYC. The National Weather Service in Cleveland had issued severe thunderstorm warnings predicting 60 mph wind gusts and lightning capable of snapping tree limbs and damaging power lines across northern Ohio, conditions that lined up with the widespread line faults reported that morning.
A Third Blackout in a Single Week
Monday's outage marked the third major storm-related power disruption to hit Cuyahoga and neighboring Lorain counties within a single week, following severe weather events on August 5 and August 7, according to earlier Hoodline reporting. That pattern fits a broader trend: BG Independent News reported in May that the National Weather Service in Cleveland had already issued 95 severe thunderstorm warnings for the year, more than double the volume logged by the same point in 2023.
The repeated outages arrive as FirstEnergy faces mounting regulatory pressure in Ohio. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio rejected a FirstEnergy application in June to relax its minimum electric reliability performance standards, keeping existing restoration time limits in place. Just three days before Monday's storm, PUCO staff issued a notice of probable noncompliance to FirstEnergy's Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., proposing a $3.05 million forfeiture over repeated summer power disruptions in Cuyahoga County.
What Residents Should Do
North Royalton residents still without power can report outages by calling FirstEnergy at 1-888-LIGHTSS or by texting OUT to 544487, and can track restoration progress through the utility's 24/7 Power Center online map. Neither the city nor FirstEnergy has provided a specific restoration timeline for the roughly 3,000 affected accounts as crews continue assessing storm damage across the region.
