CINCINNATI -- The thunderstorms that swept through Greater Cincinnati Thursday afternoon were long gone by nightfall, but residents could be cleaning up after them for days to come.
The casualties of strong winds included trees and power lines, some of which crashed into buildings. Ceisaley Moeckel of Covington, Kentucky, said she was playing "Call of Duty" when the wind picked up and swiftly turned a pole outside her home into a potentially dangerous roadblock.
"It did a big ol' spark, and then the whole live wire was just laying in the middle of the street," she said.
At one point, more than 46,000 Duke Energy customers were without power. Thanks to the speedy intervention of repair crews, that number had dropped to around 12,000 by early Friday morning.
"It was just so quick," Duke spokeswoman Sally Thelen said of the storm. "And what a punch it packed! Trees just literally were down everywhere."
Rick Iscra was watching the rapid shift from his deck in Northside when he heard the unmistakeable sound of crunching metal. He initially believed it had been a nearby car crash, but then he looked at the house next door.
Its metal roof, which police estimated could weigh thousands of pounds, had been blown off in the storm and landed on another neighboring home.
"It was a few feet away, let's put it that way," Iscra said.
