Mahoning Valley - Severe weather throughout the Valley over the weekend left many residents without power with thousands still left in the dark. 21 News talked with FirstEnergy's Lauren Siburkis about plans to reduce the impacts of these outages in the future.

Valley residents have expressed all sorts of frustrations with the outages with one telling us they have spent days without hot water and another resident on food stamps telling us all his food has now gone to waste.

"The food I just bought off my food stamp card, $270 worth, it's all destroyed and I can't eat it," said Youngstown resident, William confer.

Siburkis tells 21 News FirstEnergy is working on a $626 million investment proposal that would expand the company's coverage area. This is an extension of an already existing program called Grid Mod 1.

"Here in the greater Youngstown area, we've benefitted greatly from the automated technology that we installed through the grid modernization 1 plan," Siburkis said.

The plan includes backup powerlines for when one goes down and remotely fixing an outage when it happens.

"Right now, customers are reporting their outages when they happen. In the future with smart meters, we'll be able to automatically detect those outages," Siburkis said.

Siburkis says FirstEnergy can't prevent power outages altogether, but they can at least minimize them with this proposal.

"With grid modernization 2, we'll be able to hopefully if approved install another 700,000 smart meters to customers across Ohio which includes customers in the Valley," Siburkis said.

This approval would have to come from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. The proposal was filed back in July, and FirstEnergy is expecting to hear back in the coming months.