BLAKELY, Pa. — A busy road in Lackawanna County was shut down Friday morning because of a downed utility pole.
A tractor-trailer crashed into the pole along Main Street in the Peckville section of Blakely and took wires down.
Teressa Lach works at Joe's Beerman across the street and saw the whole thing happen.
"The 18-wheeler was going by. He got snagged on the power lines. It will like something like Independence Day because the 18-wheeler went through and there was like a big explosion," Lach said.
Police Chief Guy Salerno says power was out to the entire borough of Blakely. All the traffic lights along Main Street and Business Route 6 were affected, and extra manpower responded to help direct traffic.
"The initial incident, we only have two to three officers on, so we did have surrounding areas assist us. Now we have the extra manpower in, so we can take care of our own stuff," said the chief.
Joe's Beerman was temporarily open as employees did math by hand and accepted cash only.
Denise Rasbeck works at Chocolate Creations and said all she could do was wait for customers to pick up orders and buy time until the power was restored.
"My boss was clean so I'm going to go cleaning here in a few minutes. I did the windows nice and sparkly clean."
Rasbeck says several businesses have delivery trucks that go that way. She's always worried about the power lines being too low.
"We had delivery guys come and one guy called me, 'Are you sure I can go in that driveway? That line is really low,'" Rasbeck said. "'I think you can. They've done it before,' and he was like really scared to come in there. And now today, boom!"
Chief Salerno says it's unclear whether the driver of the truck will be cited.
For the most up-to-date information on the outage, check out these outage maps:
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