Tri-State News for Thursday
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 Milford uses portable generator to keep its traffic light flalshing |
The calm after the storm
Twenty-four hours of one line of violent storms after another is over, and the region can enjoy at least a day of relief from a weather pattern more typical of august than May. The storms were blamed for isolated instances of downed trees and property damage, including some fires started by the frequent and violent lightning.
An employee at Skydyne, in Port Jervis, was injured, Wednesday morning, by lightning. The employee was taken to Mercy Community Hospital but did not appear seriously hurt.
The big problem, Wednesday morning, was a two and a half hour power outage that hit at the peak of the rush hour and as students were pouring into local schools. A blown underground circuit was blamed for the outage that affected more than 4,000 Orange and Rockland customers in the Port Jervis area of Orange County and in Matamoras, Westfall and Milford in Pike County. Power went out about 8:20 and came back on shortly before 11:00. O&R had to initially divert crews from that outage because of a bigger outage, at 8:49, affecting 44,000 customers elsewhere in Orange County. That outage lasted about 16 minutes.
During the long outage,
Milford officials used a portable generator to keep the traffic light
flashing at the very busy Broad and Harford intersection.