Flagpole installation acrossOhio

Flagpoles in Ohio

State buildings in Columbus, lake frontage at Cleveland and Toledo, hillside ground above the river at Cincinnati. One quote carries the pole, the foundation, the flag and the labour, sized to the ground it is going into.

Wind here. Ohio prints one design wind speed for the whole state. The Residential Code of Ohio fills in 115 mph and leaves it there, so a pole in Cincinnati and a pole in Ashtabula are sized to the same figure and no town is free to go under it. The ASCE 7 map underneath runs a little lower, roughly 105 to 110 mph across Ohio, which is why 115 is a comfortable number here rather than a tight one. The shaft, in other words, is usually settled before we start. The ground is not. That same state table leaves the frost line blank for each jurisdiction to fill in, so the depth of the hole is confirmed with the department that will come and inspect it; the weathering rating for concrete is severe from the river to the lake; and on the Lake Erie shore ice loads a flag and a halyard in a way no wind map counts.

• The southwest and the Miami valleys — Cincinnati, Dayton and the river towns between them. The shaft is the easy part down here and the ground is not: hillsides that slide above the Ohio, and buried-valley sand and gravel along the Great Miami that augers easily and then will not hold the sides of a hole.
• Central Ohio and the till plains — Columbus out across the farm counties, on dense glacial clay that holds a footing beautifully and augers slowly. Flat ground with nothing standing on it for a mile is the thing that changes a shaft here, so farm and distribution sites get worked out from what the pole can actually see.
• The Lake Erie shore — Toledo, Sandusky, Cleveland and the counties either side. Fresh water, so nothing corrodes the way it does on a coast, but open fetch in front and ice on the rope and the pulley all winter. Hardware gets specified harder along this shore than a wind figure on its own would ask for.
• Akron, Canton and the eastern counties — The snowbelt overhead and the interesting part underground: Sharon conglomerate close under the Akron ridges, worked-out coal under Mahoning and Columbiana. Here the hole takes more thought than the pole does.

Flying the Ohio flag? We sell it, sewn to the state's own design specification and sized to sit under the national flag on your pole. See the Ohio flag →