Storm on Wednesday hit county with heavy rainfall
Published 4:29 pm Thursday, May 28, 2015
Water collected outside of Helfi’s Grill in Clanton from a thunderstorm on Wednesday. (Contributed Photos)
A late afternoon thunderstorm on Wednesday hit portions of Chilton County with heavy rainfall and power outages.
Kevin Laws, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Chilton County received 2.41 inches of rain on Wednesday.
“Nearly 3.5 inches of rain fell in the past three days,” Laws said on Thursday. “We are now back in a wet pattern, and we have had a lot of rain over the past few days.”
Much of the rain seemed to accumulate in downtown Clanton, leaving several business owners trying to prevent flooding to their businesses.
“It was a big mess,” Helfi’s Grill owner Eric Helfenstine said. “We didn’t have any water come into the business, but it was a mess during the storm and afterward everything seemed to dry out.”
Helfenstine said employees at the restaurant tried to prevent water coming into the business by using mops to mop away the water.
“We also got sandbags, and put those in front of the front doors, which seemed to help,” Helfenstine said. “The problem is the water came down really fast.”
Clanton Mayor Billy Joe Driver said he had not received any major reports of flooding in Clanton, but there were large amounts of water near parts of downtown Clanton.
Chilton County received 2.41 inches of rain on Wednesday with many businesses in downtown Clanton seeing rain accumulate in the area.
“I drove around on Wednesday, and there was quite a bit of rain that came down,” Driver said. “It seemed to be a lake near Helfi’s and then we had the area that is the highest point in town have some flooding, but I think that was due to a sewer backup.”
Mike Jordan, an Alabama Power representative, said there were 625 customers without electricity in Chilton County on Wednesday with about 430 of those outages in Verbena.
On Thursday morning, Jordan said service had been restored to all of the Alabama Power customers in Chilton County around 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
Jordan said many of the outages were weather related due to lightning and limbs and trees pushing into power lines.
Alabama Power customers in Verbena lost power at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
Central Alabama Electric Cooperative communications specialist Tiffany Trueblood said Wednesday’s storms caused 113 CAEC customers to be without power.
As of Thursday, all outages reported with CAEC had been restored.
Laws said more rainfall is expected over the next week or so, with mostly showers and thunderstorms.
“It will continue to be in the summer-like fashion, so the rainfall distribution won’t be equal across the county,” Laws said. “But, we could have instances of well over an inch or more.”
On Friday, there is a 40-percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 7 a.m. with a high near 85 degrees. On Friday night, there is a 20-percent chance of showers and thunderstorms with mostly cloudy skies and a low around 66 degrees.
Saturday highs should be around 86 degrees with a 20-percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. The overnight lows on Saturday should be around 68 degrees.
