Valley experiences power outages, closures amid severe weather

The Mahoning and Shenango Valley regions are experiencing some severe weather as of Sunday, June 14.

The Skyway Drive-In movie theater, located along North Leavitt Road in Warren, is closed for the night, posting to its Facebook page that the theater experienced “a small tornado rip through” the area.

As a result, the movie theater will be closed on Sunday for the remainder of the day. They look to get everything fixed by next weekend.

A roadway in North Lima is closed for the time being. Beaver Township police tell 21 News that a tree caught fire in the area of Market Street and Garfield Road near a telephone pole.

Crews are on site to close the roadway. Ohio Edison has been made aware of the damage and has been called to help.

Additionally, FirstEnergy is reporting several thousand outages across Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana Counties in Ohio, plus Mercer and Lawrence Counties in Pennsylvania.

In total, across all five counties, 2,346 customers are in the dark as of 5 p.m. Now, as of 7:30 p.m., that number has reached over 6,000 outages.

Of those outages, 867 were being reported from Trumbull County, primarily in Kinsman Township, with a total of 560, and Gustavus Township, with a total of 138. The remainder of the outages were from additional communities.

Kinsman Township still reports 560 outages, and is followed by Gustavus Township with 139 and Warren and Warren Township reporting a combined 141 outages.

In Mahoning County, 370 outages were reported. That number has now risen to 794 outages. Goshen Township is reporting 514, while other communities of the county are reporting up to 40 customers without power.

Columbiana County was reporting 41 outages, and now, as of 7:30 p.m., is reporting over 2,000 outages.

In total, 2,876 customers are without power. Of those outages, 1,130 customers are within Butler Township. Salem Township is reporting 473 outages, Salem is reporting 138, Fairfield Township is reporting 259 outages and several other communities are reporting over 100 customers in the dark.

In Pennsylvania, Lawrence County is now reporting 619 outages, while Mercer County is reporting 1,103.

The townships and boroughs within Mercer County reporting the highest outage numbers include:

• Jamestown Borough has 364, which is 75% of the population there

• Greene Township has 267, which is 51% of the community’s population

• Salem Township has 212, which is 66% of the population there

• Sandy Creek Township, which is reporting 117 outages, or 31% of the population

The City of Niles also issued an advisory to residents, indicating that there are several reported outages throughout the city and the electric department is working on restoring power to the impacted areas.

A majority of the communities experiencing power outages across all five counties had an estimated restoration time of 8:30 p.m. or 9 p.m. on Sunday. Now, the estimated restoration time has been pushed back to around 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. in most Mahoning and Trumbull County communities. No restoration times are given for Columbiana, Lawrence and Mercer Counties.

As of 5 p.m., a severe thunderstorm warning was in effect for the southeastern portion of Trumbull County and all of Mahoning County.

Some severe thunderstorms were spotted on weather radar along a line that extended from Warren to the area of Canfield and Alliance, continuing to move east.