Severe thunderstorms also spawned at least one tornado Wednesday night and a wind gust of 100 mph elsewhere in Oklahoma, causing damage, authorities said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries, but damage was reported in several counties as storms blossomed along a southward-moving cold front Wednesday night.
“Anadarko has been hit hard,” Caddo County Emergency Management Director Larry McDuffey said. “We don’t know if it was from straight-line winds or from a tornado.
“There are power lines down everywhere.”
School officials canceled classes for the day because of the outage.
National Weather Service meteorologist Christine Riley said teams from that agency were headed to the Anadarko area on Thursday morning to examine damage to try and determine if a tornado touched down. She said that such a determination could be made by Thursday night.
The local storm report on the Web site for the weather service’s Norman office, which is based on preliminary information, had no mention of a tornado in the Anadarko area but several mentions of strong wind gusts.
The number of power outages had been reduced to less than 800 by Thursday morning, said Public Service Company of Oklahoma spokesman Ed Bettinger.
“After the storm passed, we had about 3,100 in that Chickasha, Anadarko, Gracemont area and we still have 772 in that general area and hope to have all customers back on later this (Thursday) morning.”
Oklahoma Gas and Electric reported on its Web site 5,144 outages.
Dozens of inmates were evacuated from the Caddo County jail and relocated in city jails in the region because of a gas line break, McDuffey said.
Downed power lines and large trees on U.S. Highways 62 and 281 made Anadarko inaccessible from the east, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported.
A tornadic storm was spotted about 6 miles west of Tonkawa in Kay County, but emergency crews didn’t find a damage path, said Charles Conaghan, emergency management director for Tonkawa.
Garfield County Emergency Management Director Mike Honigsberg says tornado sirens sounded in the county as a precaution but there was no confirmed tornado, just half dollar-size hail.
In Midwest City, immediately east of Oklahoma City, four houses were hit by lighting and suffered significant damage, Fire Marshal Jerry Lojka said. Four firefighters suffered minor injuries in fighting blazes caused by the lightning strikes.
In northeast Oklahoma, a tornado warning was issued for Washington County, where a 100 mph wind gust was recorded west of the Bartlesville airport, authorities said.
“We had some minor damage but never had a tornado confirmed,” said Melissa Pitner, a spokeswoman for Washington County Emergency Management. “We had trees and power lines down, carports and fence damage.
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