Thousands lose power during storm

Storms and a possible tornado caused damage across western Daviess County and into Owensboro Wednesday night, knocking out power for thousands.

Most of the affected homes had their power restored by late morning Thursday, and crews for both Owensboro Municipal Utilities and Kenergy were still out replacing poles and reconnecting the remaining homes.

Andy Ball, director of Daviess County Emergency Management, said the majority of the storm damage was between the Henderson-Daviess County line and Frederica Street.

“I think we had a couple of separate systems that affected mostly west of Frederica Street,” Ball said. Most of the storm damage occurred from Frederica Street “all the way to the county line,” including Stanley and St. Joseph, Ball said.

Video footage shared with Daviess EMA shows a possible tornado, Ball said.

“I think we had at least one tornado,” Ball said, and “that’s my opinion, not fact.”

A damage assessment team from the National Weather Service will be in the county Friday or Monday. Part of the assessment will include whether or not the damage was caused by a tornado or straight-line winds.

“Just now, they are focusing on Illinois and Tennessee,” Ball said Thursday afternoon.

Most the damage took the form of downed trees, which broke power lines. Ball said there were four to six reports of trees falling on roofs and damaging homes.

Daviess County Sheriff’s Department reports say deputies responded to multiple calls of downed trees and power lines. Kentucky 56 between Kentucky 500 and Kentucky 815 is closed, and is expected to remain closed until late this weekend or early next week, according to the state highway department.

West Fifth Street Road between Kentucky 1554 and Stanley Birk City Road was also closed Thursday, due to broken power poles and power lines. The road was expected to be closed at least overnight, according to Owensboro-Daviess County Central Dispatch.

The affected area of the roadway is closed so utility crews can deal with “major utility pole damage,” a highway department press release says.

Sonya Dixon, communications and public relations manager for Owensboro Municipal Utilities, said the storm downed trees and power poles.

“I think, at our peak, we were close to 4,000 people without power, Dixon said.

Less than 80 customers were still without power as of 2 p.m., according to OMU’s outage map. The damage was largely on the city’s west side, Dixon said.

“Our crews are still working,” Dixon said later Thursday morning. The storm impacted the “the very treed areas. The area around the Sportscenter was affected.”

During the storm, crews, who had repaired damage, were called back to the same neighborhoods when new damage occurred, Dixon said.

The areas where power could be restored to the most people were repaired first, Dixon said.

Crews “are still working until it’s all done and until everyone has power,” Dixon said.

Leslie Barr, communications and public relations specialist for Kenergy, said about 3,000 people lost power across the utility’s entire service area. As of last Thursday morning, 570 Kenergy members were without power. About 540 of them were in Daviess County, Barr said.

“We’ve got broken poles and trees that came down on lines,” Barr said. “As of 7 o’clock (Thursday morning), we had at least 20 broken poles.”

Kenergy has brought in additional work crews from its Henderson and Marion headquarters to repair storm damage.

“We had crews (working) all through the night,” Barr said. “We don’t stop, even when the weather is going.”