Loud Bang May be Power Line Recloser

Stow residents heard another mysterious, loud bang this week.

But this time, the mystery may be solved.

Readers posted on the Stow Patch Facebook page Tuesday night asking each other if they’d heard yet the latest loud noise.

“I swore it sounded just like a gunshot,” Shelby Olive Denton wrote. “Although my brother said he thought it was a firecracker.”

In reality it might not have been either.

Chris Eck, a spokesperson for FirstEnergy, said the power company had no outages in Stow around 10:45 p.m. when people reported hearing the noise and having disruptions with their TV cable service.

However, Eck said it might have been a recloser, a piece of equipment that automatically makes several attempts to reclose a power circuit when it’s been accidentally opened — by something like a small animal or tree striking a transformer.

“My guess is that’s what happened,” Eck said. “That can also cause a loud cracking noise as well as a temporary outage. That would be enough to mess up people’s cable boxes and their clocks would need reset.”

Both residents of Stow and neighboring Kent have reported loud noises occasionally coupled with temporary power or cable disruptions in the past month.

Eck said that when an animal, such as a squirrel, breaks a circuit the shock typically blows the animal out and allows the recloser to reconnect the circuit – after the momentary outage — to restore power.

“We don’t have any obvious calls in Stow last night for a fix, but that’s doesn’t mean the obvious didn’t happen or something didn’t go ‘kaboom,’” he said.