Despite severe thunderstorm and flash food warnings, weekend storms didn’t bring much more than welcomed relief for Clark County.
Residents were mostly free of any weather-related trouble during the weekend, though some homes lost power.
Clark County Emergency Management Director Gary Epperson said there were no reports of damage throughout the county and few trees or branches obstructed local roads. Clark County Road Supervisor Kevin Wilson said his office dealt with a handful of trees down but nothing out of the ordinary.
The storms could help lift the local burn ban, County Judge-Executive Henry Branham said.
“We plan on reviewing it,” he said. “The temperatures have lowered, and we got an inch and a half of rain. We need to see what kind of effect this had on the conditions around us.”
Branham said a decision on the burn ban would be made this afternoon.
Everything wasn’t completely roses, though, as a pair of power outages hit the county, Cliff Feltham of Kentucky Utilities said. The first outage was caused by the heat, he said, and left 207 KU customers without power Sunday from around 6 p.m to 9 p.m.
The second outage was caused by lightning strikes, leaving 1,500 customers without power.
Most customers had power restored by 10 p.m., and 150 more customers had power return over night.
At approximately 6 p.m. Sunday, firefighters responded to a blown transformer on Estes Drive.
Winchester Fire-EMS Lt. Byron Schroedel said the damage was weather related, but firefighters had difficulty assessing the situation because of heavy rain and lightning Sunday evening.
Schroedel said he is unsure how many people were affected.
In just a week, July has already been much wetter than June. With 1.51 inches of rain in eight days, July has surpassed June’s .88 inches of precipitation, according to the Kentucky Mesonet website.
The rainy weather might hang around. The National Weather Service expects some chance of rain and thunderstorms for Winchester through Sunday.
Contact Casey Castle at ccastle@winchestersun.com.
