Hurricane in Owensboro…..?

By: Kelsey Martin

Side eye….. Side eye….. Hurricane in Owensboro? WHAT!?!? RAPID WINDS. CARS. TRAMPOLINES. TRASH CANS. EVERYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE FLYING. HOUSES. SO MANY OTHER THINGS DESTROYED.

On Friday, March 3, OPS and DCPS schools woke up to a message at 5:00 in the morning saying, “School is closed due to bad weather that we are expecting…”. We were all excited for the free day, but would shortly find out what was truly in store for us that day.

As storms lashed the area with high winds and heavy rainfall, thousands of people lost power in Owensboro and across the region on Friday. Extremely high wind speeds were recorded, as the National Weather Service was estimating wind speed across the region was as high as 60 to 70 miles per hour. We had significant damage throughout the city, including trees down, powerlines snapped, structures damaged, etc. Between three and four inches or rain had fallen by the time the storm moved east out of the region.

City Fire Chief James Howard said firefighters responded to 19 reports of people needing assistance after the storm, many of which were storm-related. As many as 4,000 OMU customers were without power during the height of the OMU outage, but crews had restored power to areas around Tamarack Road and around Booth Avenue before 4:00 PM. Crews responded to approximately 200 different damage points.

This may not have been a hurricane, but this type of storm was something that we haven’t seen in the city in a long time, if ever.

“High winds that come out of nowhere are uninvited gusts…”