Storms cause concern across some N.C. areas
By News-Argus Staff
Published in News on August 10, 2007 1:46 PM
Heavy storms raked portions of Wayne County Thursday evening, knocking down some trees and causing scattered power outages.
County emergency officials said there was no severe damage, but that lightning struck a grocery store in Mount Olive and high winds pushed over a tree on N.C. 111 south, blocking traffic near its intersection with St. John Church Road. Workers with the state Department of Transportation immediately removed the downed tree.
The storms were scattered. Some areas of the county received upwards of two inches of rain, while weather officials at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base recorded no precipitation at all.
Thursday's storms didn't hurt power lines as bad as a storm Wednesday, Progress Energy Operations Manager Keith Westbrook said this morning.
In Dudley a downed tree took down seven stands of primary lines. The same thing happened in the Grantham area.
"Crews worked until 3 a.m. getting customers restored," Westbrook said. "We did a lot of switching."
"Last night wasn't real bad," Westbrook said. "There were a few outages, but not nearly as many as the night before."