Ohio Task Force One volunteers know they’re going somewhere east, but exactly where they’ll end up has yet to be decided.

“A lot of times they’re still getting things sorted out while we’re on the road,” spokesman Dan Kochensparger said.

Kochensparger said the federally-funded group had a four-hour window to coordinate the efforts and get the 80 volunteers on the road. The group specializes in finding and extricating disaster victims.

“We’ll probably end up doing a lot of searching of residential areas as opposed to commercial,” he said.

Already helping hurricane victims are Ohio Red Cross volunteers. Thirteen volunteers from central and southeast Ohio are working at shelters in New Jersey and Maryland.

But spokeswoman Lynn Cook expects more volunteers to deploy and efforts to shift as the storm and recovery move forward.

“We’ll start to transition our response from emergency sheltering to getting out and working with communities as they start to clean out.”

Both organizations anticipate recovery efforts to be extensive. Red Cross volunteers generally are in the field three weeks, while Task Force members are on 10-day shifts.

The Tuesday event at Fairmont High School in Kettering is scheduled to start at 11 a.m.

A Romney spokeswoman said the event will be “a disaster relief event where Gov. Romney may make brief remarks.” Another Romney event in Lima Tuesday has been canceled.

Romney and President Obama had canceled campaign stops Monday as Sandy bore down on the U.S. coast. It brought devastating damage and millions of power outages to a large swath of the northeast, including parts of eastern Ohio.

Mr. Obama has another Ohio stop planned for Thursday.

AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry says they’re mobilized between 300 and 400 workers from more-western states like Texas and Oklahoma.

“They’ve been talking about this storm for some time, and they went ahead and mobilized crews. And especially once the indications were that it was going to have an impact on our operations in West Virginia, Virginia and Ohio, we made sure that we would have additional crews,” McHenry says.

The weather has already led to canceled flights out of Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland and Cincinnati. Forecasters are calling for winds of up to 60 miles per hour in parts of central Ohio tonight and into tomorrow.

FirstEnergy was reporting more than 247,000 customers without power in northeast Ohio, mostly in the Cleveland area, before dawn Tuesday. The utility also reported other scattered outages across the northern section of the state and down into Central Ohio. AEP Ohio reported around 6,000 interruptions in the Canton area and Central Ohio.

As of 8 a.m., power had been restored to nearly all of AEP’s central Ohio customers.

In Columbus, Tuesday morning commuters were dealing with snow-covered roadways, including this scene on Manchester Ave. on the city’s North side.

State emergency manage officials say the Ohio Department of Transportation has about 30 trucks clearing debris and felled trees from roads around Central Ohio.

High wind warnings are still in effect in much of central and eastern Ohio for much of Tuesday.

In northern Ohio, most shipping vessels on Lake Erie sought safe harbor from massive waves and wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour.

The storm has also cancelled and delayed many flights at all of the state’s largest airports.

The massive storm made landfall in New Jersey Monday night with 80 mph sustained winds, killing at least 16 people in seven states.