LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- More than 222,000 people in Kentucky are waiting for their power to be restored after severe storms brought damaging winds and heavy rain Friday afternoon.
Crews are working to restore power as quickly and safely as possible, but an LG&E spokesperson said Friday's storms mark the "third most significant event" to affect the utility system in 20 years.
As of 11 p.m. Friday, an estimated 78,044 LG&E and KU customers in Jefferson County were still in the dark, and some of them may be waiting for several days.
Liz Pratt, a spokesperson for LG&E and KU, emphasized to WDRB News the "significance of this storm event and the wind that moved through our area."
"Across our service territories, both LG&E and Kentucky Utilities, we have about 223,000 customers without power," Pratt said. "Based on current information, in the last 20 years, this has been the third most significant event to affect our system.
She said crews and contract partners are working around the clock across the service areas to restore power following the event she said had "a significant impact on" the LG&E/KU system, which is in its restoration process. As part of that, the utility will restore critical services, such as hospitals, fire departments and police departments, first.
"Again we appreciate what this means for our customers and we appreciate our customers' patience during this time," Pratt said. "We ask customers to continue to report power outages, if they see a downed wire to assume it's a live power line, stay away and report it to us immediately. And absolutely use our online outage map as a resource for near-real time updates, so as our crews continue making restoration progress, you'll continue to see those updates reflected on our online outage map."
To track LG&E and KU outages in Kentucky, click here.
In southern Indiana, about 13,000 Duke Energy customers were still without power at 11 p.m. Friday. The utility company said Clarksville and Corydon were hit the hardest by Friday's storms.
"One of our biggest challenges that we're experiencing is the high winds. Our line technicians can't perform elevated work and get up in those bucket trucks when the winds are above 30 miles per hour," said Duke Energy spokesperson McKenzie Barbknecht. "So as some of the severe winds weaken, some of the rain subsides overnight, we'll be able to get out there and address a lot of these problem spots much sooner and you'll start to see the pace of some of our outage restoration work begin to accelerate."
To track Duke Energy outages in Indiana, click here.
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