Jun 23, 2015 2 min read

Humid weather quickly turned into a fierce storm Tuesday afternoon, wiping out power for thousands of customers and bringing down trees and utility poles in a matter of minutes.

More than 3,040 outages in Washington County were reported by West Penn Power at 3:30 p.m., shortly after the storm started. There were zero outages only a half-hour prior, said company spokesman Todd Meyers.

Of those affected customers, power was restored for 2,645 households as of Tuesday night, but many municipalities were still cleaning up the damage late into the evening.

Several roads in Canonsburg were flooded, including Sixth Street, Ashland Avenue, South Central Avenue, Archer Street, Weavertown Road and Cavasina Drive.

“They’re like little lakes all over the place,” Canonsburg Mayor Dave Rhome said during the storm.

Traffic lights stopped functioning at the intersection of Weavertown and Morganza roads, and police officers were called out to direct traffic. Traffic lights also went out at the intersection of Weavertown Road and Route 19 in North Strabane Township, which caused traffic delays.

The outages were caused by a combination of wind, rain, lightning strikes and collapsed trees. At the height of the storm, Smith Township had the highest number of power outages with 1,050 customers affected, or 44 percent of the customers in the municipality. In Jefferson Township, 445 customers – 79 percent – had outages.

Customers in Burgettstown, Canonsburg, Cecil and North Strabane Township also took the brunt of power outages.

Meyers said the heavy amount of rainfall recently made the ground “marshy and soupy,” which contributed to the number of trees that fell onto roads and power lines.

“A lot of times it doesn’t take a whole lot of wind to knock some of these trees down because their roots and everything are super saturated,” he said.