An Oak Ridge Electric Department crew works late into the night after a violent storm Thursday. Above from right are ORED Crew Chief Aaron England, lineman Tom Lance, and apprentice lineman Mike Goodpasture.
All power has been restored, the Oak Ridge Electric Department reported about midnight Thursday, roughly six hours after violent storms roared through East Tennessee, causing widespread damage and power outages, and trapping visitors in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
In Oak Ridge, the city staff reported outages in Rarity Ridge and on Berwick Drive, Bear Creek and Berea roads, Warwick and Hoyt lanes, and Andover, Iris, and East Wadsworth circles.
Residents reported outages in other locations from West Outer Drive and Montana Avenue to Grove Center and Oak Ridge Turnpike.
Officials in the Oak Ridge Electric Department said they didn’t know how many customers lost power Thursday.
But a few hours after the storm, by 10:30 p.m., the Electric Department reported that only a few scattered small outages remained, and most, if not all of those, were due to fallen trees or branches.
Oak Ridge Electric Department crews had to remove a tree limb that had fallen into power lines on South Purdue Avenue.
In Woodland around midnight, a three-man crew cut down a Bradford Pear tree limb that had fallen into a power line on South Purdue Avenue. Crew members had been working non-stop since about 6 p.m., when the ferocious storms blew south from the Ohio River Valley, bringing 70-mph winds and knocking out power to tens of thousands of customers in East Tennessee.
The city provided updates during the storm on Twitter. That Twitter feed is available at https://twitter.com/#!/corelectricdept.
Meanwhile, officials at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park confirmed that two people died during the storms.
