ELYRIA — The Lorain County Justice Center was closed for most of the day Monday after a problem with an electrical transformer knocked out power to the building.
County Facilities Manager Karen Davis said power was lost about 9:30 a.m. and was mostly restored by 11:40 a.m. with everything being back online shortly after noon.
The restoration of power came shortly after county Probate Judge James Walther, the county’s presiding judge, and other elected officials made the decision to close the building for the rest of the day.
Walther said the problem was not so much the lack of electricity that kept computers and many lights off but rather the lack of plumbing.
Both Walther and Davis said the Justice Center uses electrical pumps to force water to the restrooms throughout the seven-story building, and those pumps aren’t tied into a backup generator used in power outages.
That meant that toilets couldn’t be flushed, and water fountains and sinks had only trickles of water coming out of them.
“We can’t remain open for any kind of extended period of time without water,” Walther said, adding that he’s asked Davis to look into finding a way to get the pumps connected to the backup generator.
Even that wouldn’t have worked in the beginning of the outage, because Davis said the surge was so powerful it tripped a breaker in the generator, causing that to go offline for about 20 minutes.
Davis said she plans to examine how much it would cost to hook up the water pumps to the backup generator. She said she believes the system is powerful enough to handle running the pumps because the generator is strong enough to power an elevator.
She said unlike last week, when a wider outage knocked out power over a large swath of Northeast Ohio, no one was stuck in the building’s elevators Monday.
“It could have been worse,” she said.
The closure of the building delayed numerous scheduled court proceedings, including the ongoing involuntary manslaughter trial of Timothy Walton-Kirkendoll, who is facing charges for his alleged role in the 2012 death of 2-year-old Demarius Boone.
That trial will resume today.
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