Pittsburgh: A powerful storm downed trees and power lines, leaving more than a half million customers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and neighbouring states in the dark on Wednesday morning, with local officials reporting that at least two people had been electrocuted.
More than 440,000 customers were without power in Pennsylvania and another 50,000 were in the dark in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us, a website that tracks outages. Neighbouring states including Michigan, New York and West Virginia reported thousands of outages as well.
One man was electrocuted on Tuesday evening while trying to put out a mulch fire near a utility pole as severe weather hit the State College area, damaging many trees and utility lines, police said.
In Pittsburgh, first responders were called to the South Side Slopes area on Tuesday evening for reports of a person electrocuted by live wires and the person died on the scene.