Mother Nature likes Louisville in the dark

The latest number on this new round of power outages:

A front that followed a line of thunderstorms, generating winds of up to 60 mph, blew through the Louisville area late this afternoon, leaving about 20,000 LG&E customers without power.

Utility officials in Southern Indiana were reporting almost 8,000 customers without power about 5 p.m. in Clark, Floyd and Harrison counties.

Shortly after the storms moved through the area early in the afternoon, Louisville Gas & Electric Co. was reporting 2,100 outages, most of them in the southern part of the county.

“We kind of thought we were out of the woods there,” said Chip Keeling, a spokesman for the utility.

But then the winds arrived and LG&E saw a spike of outages. The number are expect to continue to rise until about 10 p.m., when the winds were expected to slow.

Keeling said customers without power were spread across the metro area and crews were out working to repair lines damaged by the wind storm.

The outages come just days after LG&E restored power to approximately 200,000 customers who lost it when a late January ice storm brought down trees, limbs and power lines. Across the state almost 700,000 people had lost power in that storm and some customers in Western Kentucky are still waiting to have it restored.