| By Big Radio News Staff |

When it comes to this year’s severe storms, Evansville keeps getting hit…and keeps picking up the pieces.

This time, it was 3,500 customers of the city of Evansville’s electric utility who caught the brunt of things as Evansville yet again found itself in the epicenter of a major storm Monday night that officials said may have included touchdown of a tornado.

That would be the second tornado to hit near Evansville this year, and probably the fourth twister to hit in Rock County since February, including an EF-2 tornado that racked Janesville’s south side and the Afton area June 22.

It comes during a stormy week that’s left Janesville and Evansville with more storm cleanup. Into mid-day Tuesday, after two straight days of heavy t-storms, several residents throughout Rock County reported seeing funnel clouds form in the sky, although none apparently touched down.

Evansville city administrator Jason Sergeant says it took Evansville Power and Light crews all night Monday to restore lost power to all customers.

The culprit was a set of lines that got clipped by a big tree blown down in the storm. Sergeant says it was not easy for crews to locate and repair the line.

Sergeant says it was tricky work and took extra time for crews to position a boom truck into the location to haul out the fallen tree and fix the downed lines.

He says it turned out the outage came after a large tree hit a power line in an out-of-the-way location in Evansville — apparently behind a local factory, between a stand of trees and adjacent to a creek that was swollen from heavy rains.

Apparently the city had restored power to most customers by early Tuesday morning, but the work took crews all night, in part because they had to temporarily patch through a complex series of electrical reroutes on the city’s grids.

He says the city is still cleaning up blown-down tree messes on the city’s streets, but no homes are reported damaged.

The Evansville area got hammered earlier this year, in February, by a tornado that did lots of rural damage. Monday night, Rock County 911 dispatch says at least one tornado touched down in Janesville.

Sergeant says the February tornado helped the city run through weather disaster emergency protocols in real time. He says most city staff now feel better prepared in the aftermath of a severe storm.

Sergeant says since February, the city’s got all its department heads who’d make up a storm response team signed onto the same cellphone network — one that won’t go down in a storm. And he says the city also has made fixes to emergency radio receivers to ensure communications by police, fire and electric utility officials stay open.

Sergeant says the city also has a more refined system its power and light headquarters can use to pinpoint outages so the city utility can reach the root causes of outages and fix damage more quickly.

While Sergeant spoke to Big Radio Tuesday afternoon, another tornado siren went off, sending Seargent for cover at city hall.

It ended up being a report of an apparent “cold air funnel,” which is a tornado that’s partially formed but never actually touches down — or only touches down briefly.

Big Radio News received several reports of such funnel clouds, including a few photos that appear to show a v-shaped funnel cloud descending from gray storm clouds. Witnesses say those funnels appeared just east of Janesville early Tuesdsay afternoon.

There was no indication those rotating clouds touched down or caused any damage.