MOUNT CARBON - Rain toppled a tree that knocked down power lines Tuesday morning and left more than 250 people in the Pottsville area without power.
The outage affected Forest Hills and Mount Carbon.
"It happened shortly after midnight. It took down a 12,000-volt distribution line which stretched across six spans. A span is the distance from one pole to another. No poles were broken but we had to straighten one of them. We initially had about 300 customers out," Joe Nixon, a spokesman for PPL Electric Utilities, Allentown, said Tuesday.
The incident was called into the Schuylkill County Communications Center at 12:18 a.m. The first responders included volunteers from Mount Carbon/North Manheim Fire Company No. 1, according to a supervisor at the communications center.
Soon afterward, firefighters and PPL workers closed off the section of South Centre Street and Mount Carbon Arch Road from Mount Carbon's Main Street to Route 61.
About 10 a.m. Tuesday, a crew of more than 50, including PPL workers and a timber contractor hired by PPL, were on scene.
"We had eight linemen on the job, and we had to bring in people to cut up the tree and remove it," Nixon said.
Power was restored to all customers by 2 p.m. Tuesday, Nixon said.
The early Tuesday morning rains brought a few trees down in Schuylkill County, but the case in Mount Carbon caused the most damage, according to the communcations supervisor.
The threat of showers will hang over the region for the next few days, according to the National Weather Service's website at weather.gov.
Today, there's a 50 percent chance of rain and a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms tonight.
On Thursday, there's also a 50 percent chance of precipitation, according to the site.