COLUMBUS, Ohio — An unplanned rise in temperature lead to an unplanned visit to COSI for many central Ohio families on Thursday.
“This was definitely because of the free day,” Daethan Hudson said. “Like, we hadn’t had this planned out.”
Hudson and Haley Knotts brought their five children.
“We’ve been swimming a lot and drinking a lot of water,” Knotts said.
They live in Newark, but this week with this heat, they say, was too much.
“It was definitely worth the gas prices for them to explore and have a whole day at COSI,” Hudson said.
A whole day at COSI for free. It was a relief from the heat and on their wallets.
“Yeah, it’s definitely a big relief,” Hudson said.
COSI partnered with Columbus City Council to waive admission fees and help people get out of the heat and who also still might have power outages.
“Oh, it’s great,” Jan Heffken said. “It’s just fantastic.”
Heffken didn’t have power for one day.
“It was enough, I wanted to stay cool,” he said. “I wanted to be someplace cool.”
“We just want to have fun today since we were hot all yesterday,” Malika Brown said.
Brown brought her daughter and two nieces to COSI. For the last two days she hasn’t had power.
“We were hungry, we were very hot,” she said. “I had to call off work because the daycares were also closed.”
COSI, for her, means more than saving money.
“That’s a huge blessing because all the pools are closed and there’s a lot of crime going on in the city,” she said. “So, we just want somewhere safe and stable right now with the AC.”
It’s also proving to be somewhat of an educational trip.
One activity at COSI literally shows the process of what it takes for power companies to be able to turn the power back on to neighborhoods.
For Brown, she says it helps her understand on a small scale what AEP Ohio is, right now, dealing with.
“When I read on the news about the power outage, it kind of, like, makes sense now,” she said. “That I can see something in front of me, instead of going based off of social media.”