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DURHAM -- Tuesday's thunderstorm knocked out power to about 650 Duke Energy customers in the Durham area, but power was restored within hours, a Duke Energy spokeswoman said.
The police department reported 16 traffic accidents in the city during the storm, from 3:30 to 7 p.m., but no fatalities. Accident figures for the part of Durham County outside the city limits were not available Wednesday.
Between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m., about 650 Durham customers were without power mainly due to lightning strikes near power lines, according to Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan. She couldn't say what parts of the county were affected.
Sheehan said the system is designed to stop power flow if it detects a nearby lightning strike or if the power line is hit directly.
"When you have severe weather, the system is set up to protect itself and to ensure it will weather the storm,'' she said. "There's something on the system called a re-closer, and the re-closer opens if it thinks something's not right.'' That halts the power flow.
"The bottom line is that if lightning either strikes the pole or strikes too near and the system thinks something is out of the ordinary, it's designed to go: "Uh oh, this isn't right. This is clearly not normal.' And it stops the flow of power.''
Crews then may have to restore power manually, although it can sometimes be done remotely, she said.
"Very often, guys go out there with a big, long pole that's a specially prepared piece of equipment and they literally snap it like you do a circuit breaker or a light switch, and reset it. But the reason it's set up to do that is because if it has been struck by lightning, you don't want power moving through it. And that's why we see scattered outages during severe weather.''
Sheehan said crews worked through the evening and had power restored by midnight or early Wednesday morning.
