Violent wind or tornado hits Pickens County

An apparent tornado or, at the least, a violent wind blew in parts of Pickens County late last night.  Damage resulted in the area of the Town of Norris.  At one point, hundreds of Blue Ridge Electric customers were left without power.  In all, some one thousand members of the cooperative’s multi-county service area incurred outages brought on by the remnants of Nate.  By late this morning, 78 Blue Ridge customers in Pickens County waited for their power to be restored.  The culprit, according to Blue Ridge spokesman Terry Ballenger, were multiple broken poles.  One pole alone, he says, means at least one to two hours in repair work.