Associated Press photo
With a relentless drought bearing down on much of the area and the state, those who hoped storms blowing through Sunday night would bring rain were disappointed to find mainly felled limbs and some downed power lines.
There were no reports of serious damage at press time, but powerful winds did cause some problems.
Sheree Gilliam, spokeswoman for InterCounty Energy, said there were some outages during the day Sunday before the storm came through after sunset. Those were caused because heat has been causing power lines to sag and come into contact with tree branches they normally wouldn’t touch, Gilliam said.
Shortly before 10 p.m. there were 15 reported outages off Ky. 198 and 64 outages on Black Pike Road in the Hustonville Area, 28 in southern Lincoln and into Casey County and 10 in Garrard County. Gilliam said all those customers had power restored by midnight.
Cliff Feltham with Kentucky Utilities said almost all of the 350-400 area customers who had power knocked out, primarily concentrated in Boyle County, had their power restored overnight, but there were small clusters of fewer than five customers still without power this morning. Feltham said the scattered nature of the outages meant many crews had to be dispatched to work on individual lines knocked out by a branches or trees, causing additional stress on a workforce still dealing with storms that ripped through the region Friday.
Boyle County Fire¿Department spokesman Lt. Jim Harris said there was at least one run, to Plantation Drive. There were numerous other reports of branches down across the area.
Linda Gilbert, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Louisville, said in the case of Sunday’s storm, as well as others recently across the region, the hot air is creating “gust fronts” that blow out ahead of a storm’s core as it moves. A wind gust map produced by the weather service showed recorded gusts of up to 42 miles per hour in Mercer and 34 miles per hour in Garrard and Lincoln.
