Four straight afternoons of storms

Once again, a late June day of sunshine vanished to darkening clouds, and the area again was pelted by isolated thunderstorms that caused problems across Oconee County, including the loss of electric power at two voting places. We’ve learned this morning about the loss of electric power affecting Oconee County customers of Duke Energy in the vicinity of Lake Keowee. One Duke customer quoted the utility as saying the estimated time for crews to return service is the 10 o’clock hour this morning.“It’s déjà vu all over again.” Correctly or incorrectly, it was a saying attributed to the late baseball star and funnyman Yogi Berra. Spokesman Terry Ballenger of the Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative said, “The repair crews working on the Blue Ridge system in the wake of Monday’s storm damage had reduced the number of members without power to just 12. Sure enough, for the 4th consecutive afternoon, a line of thunderstorms (has) swept across the northwestern corner of South Carolina and created some additional outages for us.” But this time, Ballenger said, the latest outages appeared to be more manageable than the ones earlier in the week. There was a close early last night in Fair Play. A tree that fell on Conner Boulevard narrowly missed a house.