A statewide buying desk for Ohio's surplus cable.

One state, eight industrial regions

Northeast Ohio still melts and forges steel, and it rebuilds the substations that feed the mills. Central Ohio builds data halls and distribution centres faster than anywhere else in the state, and over-orders the cable to match. Southwest Ohio runs packaging lines and machine tools along the Ohio River. Northwest Ohio pours glass and assembles vehicles on a lake plain that stores nothing well outdoors.

The Miami Valley is a thousand small precision shops. Akron and Canton work in polymer, bearings and specialty steel. The Mahoning Valley is electric-arc steel and seamless tube. Southeast Ohio is river industry, paper, ceramics, coal heritage and utility line work. Each region releases a different mix, and each one has a different access problem.

What Ohio sellers actually hold

The most common lot is not a warehouse full of identical reels. It is eight reels of four different constructions, three of them tagged, two with the tag faded, one already cut, and a pallet of coils that nobody wants to open. That lot is workable, but only if the families are separated and the evidence travels with them.

The second most common lot is a single construction in quantity: a cancelled project's THHN, a mill's spare 15 kV cable, a contractor's leftover MC. Those are the easiest to review and the easiest to price, because the facts are consistent across the whole lot.

• Full reels from cancelled or deferred projects
• Partial reels from maintenance outages and changeovers
• Obsolete storehouse stock from a plant that re-specified
• Removed cable from demolition, demolition by replacement, and mill rebuilds
• Utility and co-op line stock that no longer matches standards
• Contractor cut-offs and job-trailer coils

Logistics across Ohio

Ohio is an easy state to move freight through and a hard state to move cable out of, because the hard part is never the highway. It is the gate, the dock, the forklift, the escort and the release signature.

The desk plans around the site. A lakefront plant with a rail spur loads differently from a suburban industrial park with a level dock. A river terminal may load from a barge or a truck, and those are different appointments. Say which one applies and the plan starts there.

• I-70, I-71, I-75, I-77, I-80/90 and I-270 carry most Ohio freight
• Norfolk Southern and CSX serve the rail-served plants
• The Ohio River, Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga carry barge and ship traffic
• Rural Appalachian sites can be the hardest access in the state

How the review runs

A lot is reviewed on construction, footage, condition and storage, in that order. If the construction cannot be established, the review stops there and the desk asks for a photograph of the jacket print. If the footage cannot be established, the desk asks for a weight or a measurement.

Once those facts exist, the lot gets an offer basis and the commercial questions follow: who releases it, how it loads, and when the site can take a truck. Nothing moves before written terms cover all of it.