It was August 6th when the Mahoning Valley dealt with a severe summer storm, leaving half a million people in Ohio without power, and no idea when it would return.

The storm and its aftermath was the focus of a hearing with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. With five confirmed tornadoes that touched down in the state, FirstEnergy President Torrence Hinton called this the worst storm they've seen in decades.

"This was the most impactful storm that hit the illuminating company's service territory since July of 1993," Hinton said.

Hinton described being underprepared for what they were up against.

"While the National Weather Service and our company meteorologists were expecting the potential for seasonal thunderstorms in the area, the severe magnitude and the wide spread nature of these storms were not originally predicted," Hinton said.

However, 21 News Chief Meteorologist Eric Wilhelm challenged this claim.

"The claim that the severity of the storms on August 6th was unexpected isn't true," said Wilhelm. "The National Weather Service, Storm Prediction Center and local meteorologists all advertised well in advance the possible nature of the storms that day," he said.

John Huber, Director of Emergency Preparedness at FirstEnergy said crews were on the ground immediately.

"At the first hint of the storms on August 6th, we activated our storm response plan, which allowed us to put additional resources including contractors that were on the property and personnel from other mutual assistance organizations on standby," said Huber. "8,200 personnel were engaged in this restoration effort. FirstEnergy crews in our communities, they were there when the storm first arrived and more than 3,000 additional workers joined the effort in less than 24 hours," he said.

However, a full week would go by before power was fully restored.

"This was a huge feat given the extent of damage in the number of safety locations we responded to in those first two days," Patricia Mullin, VP of Operations for FirstEnergy said. "Customer restoration was as follows, 20% in 24 hours, 47% in 48 hours, 50% in 51 hours, 85% in 100 hours, and 95% in 124 hours which was August 11th by 6pm. Unfortunately in this particular case for me, I don't think we could have restored it faster," she said.

Hinton cited old equipment as a possible solution moving forward and that it's something they're working on.

"Here in Ohio and across our entire 6 state service territory, we are working to strengthen our grids foundation by executing our vegetation management program, building a smarter communications network and replacing or upgrading aging equipment in a cost-conscious manner," Hinton said. "We also intend to complete the installation of smart meters for all of our Ohio customers. In the future, smart meters will have the ability to detect and locate outages more quickly and provide more accurate and timely storm restoration information," he said.

FirstEnergy also spoke on what they believe went well during the aftermath of this storm.

"Our transmission system performed well and most of the outage events were momentary or reclosed by the transmission system operator," Tyler Woody, General Manager of Distribution Vegetation Operations said. "This is a testament to the work we have accomplished over the past ten years with our energizing the future program where we have invested over $10 billion since 2014," he said.

FirstEnergy will invest $26 billion in their electric system between 2024-2028 as part of their Energize365 project.