CLEVELAND — Cleveland's West Side Market resumed normal business hours on Sunday after power outages from the damaging weekend winds shut the market down on Saturday.
But that wasn't before the costly power outage ruined thousands of dollars worth of food items across the many vendors at the market.
Minnie and her husband Mark Zarefoss own Jim's meats. When word reached them of the power outage, they were scrambling. Calling customers by phone, explaining the issue on social media and making special deliveries to customers. They echoed the sentiments of many vendors at the market, wondering why they don't have access to backup generators in case of emergency.
"There was a big wind storm some time Friday night and that caused the power to go out in the building. Now we heard it happened the night before but we weren't informed. Why was there not a back up generator? We don't have one and I don't know why they don't have one. Everyone has been asking for that ."
Without backup generators, food stored in each shop's coolers sat exposed to unsafe temperatures for hours. Many vendors were forced to make the decision to throw thousands of dollars of food away.
Joey Solis is one of those vendors, but he also had a backup plan.
"When we found out, we had to rush over here try and put all our product put away. We have a store in Parma and lot of it went there."
Solis and his crew also have basement coolers at the market, but the damage was done. Solis manages several booths and the financial damage the power outage caused is staggering.
The City of Cleveland is turning over the West Side Market to the non profit Cleveland Public Market Corporation. Soils believes that is to take place this week. He hopes that with new leadership, something can be done to prevent a situation like this in the future.
"Hopefully they do bring changes, like that generator to help us with little things here and there that need done."
So many things need to be done says Zarefoss, he says it shouldn't be this hard to run a stand at the Westside Market.