"Erie Thames Powerlines experienced a direct lightning strike on one of our substations in the town of Tavistock." -Chris White, Erie Thames President The power remains out after last night's wild thunderstorm that blew through Oxford County. The strike has knocked power out to some 1500 residents throughout most of Tavistock and an additional 50 businesses. Erie Thames Power expects that will remain the case until at least around the dinner hour this evening. In the meantime, Erie Thames President Chris White advises residents to keep their fridges and freezers closed. "Certainly in terms of their produce and meats and things like that inside their freezers and that, they should keep all those doors closed. Typically that stuff should last a long period of time." White says crews are trying to assess whether the transformer that was hit is completely destroyed, or if is just insulators on the transformer that were destroyed by the strike. The damage is expected to range between 20 and 70-thousand dollars. Despite the severity of last night's lightning storm, White says this was the only significant issue with power disruptions faced by Erie Thames. Hydro One is dealing with a number of small outages in the northern half of Oxford County, and there's a larger outage due to equipment failure in western Brant County. Nearly 1800 residents are affected by that outage.

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