Winds Knock Out Power To Thousands In South, East

Associated Press

Wild wind with gusts sometimes reaching hurricane force has knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers from the Great Lakes to the East.

A downed power line forced the closure of Interstate 90 west of Erie, Pa., on Thursday morning.

About 255,000 customers were without power in Ohio alone. There were also about 52,000 outages in Michigan, more than 30,000 around Buffalo, N.Y., and about 80,000 in Pennsylvania. Outages are also reported in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Maryland and other states.

The weather service reports a wind gust of 92 mph in Allegheny County in Pennsylvania. About 200 people in the county were evacuated from homes and an assisted living center because of a storm-related gas leak.