ORANGE PARK – Severe weather kept emergency management officials in Clay County busy responding to a number of trees striking homes in the region.

Officials with Clay Electric Cooperative were also on the go responding to power outages affecting a swath of Clay County stretching from Fleming Island to Oakleaf Plantation.

Clay Electric spokesman Wayne Mattox said the outages began around 4:14 p.m. on July 12 when “lightning struck mid-span on Fleming Island Feeder 5 and burned the static wire in half. It fell across three phases, which triggered an outage which affected 2,592 accounts. It took us 28 minutes to repair this damage and restore service.”About seven minutes later, gusty winds pushed multiple trees over onto a section of Fleming Island Feeder 3 3-phase line, which caused outages for 2,898 customers. It took the power company approximately 2.5 hours to remove trees, make repairs and restore service.

However, the trouble did not end there. At 4:45 a.m.) on July 13, a green tree came down on Russell substation Feeder 5 and took out the power which affected 667 Clay Electric customer, Mattox said.

“It took us just over an hour to get this mess cleaned up and power restored,” he said.

And then, at 3:46 a.m. on July 13, portions of Oakleaf and Argyle were affected by a power outage when lightning hit a switching cabinet downline from the Clay Electric Double Branch substation.

“Just over 2,500 accounts were affected by this outage. All but six of these accounts were back on by 6:59 a.m.,” Mattox said. “Because of the damage caused by severe weather yesterday, we sent several central construction crews to assist our Orange Park district personnel with repairs.”

Mattox said Clay Electric customers experienced storm damage in Lake City and Gainesville where some of their crews worked all night to get power back up.

“In summary, severe weather that brought gusty winds, lightning, rain and hail to parts of Clay County caused power outages that had our crews busy throughout the late afternoon and into the night to get service restored for our members,” Mattox said.

The Tuesday outages came on the heels of a Sunday, July 10 outage that affected approximately 25,500 of its customers in Clay County for about 36 minutes.

Mattox said the Sunday outage was caused by a malfunctioning lightning arrestor on the high-voltage side of their Black Creek substation, likely due to the arrestor being cracked at some point in the recent past, possibly by a lightning strike.

This shut down power to four of Clay Electric’s substations – Double Branch substation, Orange Park substation, Bellair substation and Doctors Inlet substation.

“We had to get personnel to the Black Creek sub to verify the type of damage before power could be rerouted and service restored. In this situation we had to be careful and avoid causing more damage, especially since it involved power levels at 230,000 volts. Our substation maintenance division is planning to replace all of the arrestors in the Black Creek substation on transformers 1 & 2, according to our Operations Department director,” Mattox said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Clay County Emergency Management officials report that no injuries or fatalities were reported as a result of Tuesday’s storm.

Deputy Director John Ward said residents reported that 16 homes were damaged by fallen trees, with two homes receiving structural damage.

Ward said five out buildings and sheds were destroyed, however. Ward said crews worked to remove eight trees that were felled on county roadways and there were “other downed trees with no impacts to property. Our community was very lucky in this storm, however we would like to remind residents that as the cleanup begins, to stay in close contact with your insurance company, and be very cautious with unlicensed contractors,” Ward said in a prepared statement.