About 700 homes and businesses in Columbus lost their electricity as the result of a Tuesday afternoon storm, a Duke Energy spokesman said.
Most of the outages in the downtown area that began at 2:15 p.m. were caused by a heavy limb that fell across a power line east of the intersection of Ninth and Washington streets, according to Duke spokesman Chip Orbin.
The lights were off in the Bartholomew County Courthouse for almost an hour, according to an employee in the county clerk’s office. In addition, malfunctioning traffic signals along Third Street, at both the Brown and Jackson streets intersections, delayed traffic.
There was a separate outage in southeast Columbus that affected about 100 residents in the Clifty Creek Park area, Orbin said.
Some outages outside the downtown area are believed to have occurred after lightning struck a transformer, interim Bartholomew County’s 911 Emergency Operations Center director Julie Pierce said.
