Winds whip into area again
Tens of thousands lose electricity as poles and lines topple
By Emily Udell • eudell@courier-journal.com • February 12, 2009
A front that followed a line of thunderstorms and generated winds of up to 60 mph blew through the Louisville area late yesterday afternoon, knocking out power to about 37,000 Louisville Gas & Electric customers.
Utility officials in Southern Indiana were reporting less than 2,400 customers without power about 5:15 this morning in Clark, Floyd and Harrison counties.
Shortly after the storm moved through the area early in the afternoon, LG&E was reporting 2,100 outages, most of them in the southern part of Jefferson County.
"We kind of thought we were out of the woods there," said Chip Keeling, a spokesman for the utility.
But then the winds arrived, and LG&E saw a spike of outages.
Drew Case got a familiar feeling of dread when he thought the power at his Tyler Park home might go out about 6 last night.
"It flickered and we had our fingers crossed," said Case, who lost power during the September wind storm caused by Hurricane Ike and last month’s ice storm.
Keeling said customers without power were spread across the metro area, and crews were working to repair lines. The outages came just days after LG&E restored power to more than 200,000 customers who lost it when the ice storm of Jan. 27 and 28 brought down trees, limbs and power lines. Across the state, almost 700,000 people lost power in that storm, and around 30,000 are still without electricity, state officials said.
Kentucky Public Service Commission spokesman Andrew Melnykovych said last Wednesday night that yesterday’s storms had resulted in at least 120,000 new power outages across the state, a figure that doesn’t include Tennessee Valley Authority cooperatives or municipalities.
Some areas that escaped the ice storm were hit by yesterday’s weather, Melnykovych said, but others were left in the dark for a second time.
"I’m sure people’s patience is running about as thin as it can get and understandably so," he said. While 35 deaths in Kentucky were linked to the ice storm, no fatalities have been reported from yesterday’s storms and wind.
There were reports of possible injuries in Trimble, Johnson, Hopkins and Whitley counties and of possible tornadoes in Breathitt, Garrard, Knox and Whitley counties, said Buddy Rogers, spokesman for the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.
Knox and Whitley counties declared states of emergency, Rogers said.
In Floyds Knobs, Ind., Lisa Easton thought, "those famous words — here we go again" when she lost power about 4:30 yesterday.
Easton was among those who experienced outages during both the September wind storm and the ice storm. She said she and her two children played battery-powered video games to pass the time until the power came back on about 11 p.m.
"We’ve done this so many times, it’s like old hat to us," she said
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