Line crews from Cullman Electric Cooperative and points beyond its service area remained in the field overnight Friday, working to restore power to thousands of local customers whose service was interrupted by a ferocious straight-line windstorm that swept across Cullman County earlier in the day.

The freakish windstorm recorded steady wind speeds at Cullman Regional Airport approaching 50 mph, with the Huntsville office of the National Weather Service putting out a seldom-seen High Wind Warning earlier in the day that anticipated isolated straight-line gusts of up to 80 mph.

Speeds like that, noted Cullman Emergency Management Agency director Tim Sartin late Friday, exceed those required to denote a Category 1 hurricane, whose wind speed threshold begins at 74 mph.

“I can’t give you an exact number of trees that have fallen down, but it’s safe to say ‘a bunch,’” said Sartin. “It’s been a crazy, crazy, crazy day. Fortunately, we’ve had no reported injuries in Cullman County, and the damage that has been reported to us has consisted of cases mainly of partial — but not total — structural damage from fallen trees.”

The windstorm’s widespread path across north Alabama played havoc with rural power line infrastructure in Cullman and neighboring counties, as hundreds of isolated tree topplings led to thousands of outages. At the outage’s peak, the Cullman Electric Cooperative had identified approximately 20,000 metered accounts that had lost power service due to the windstorm — a number approaching nearly half of the Co-op’s total member base of 46,500 metered accounts.

“It’s the single biggest outage event in Cullman County that I can think of since the April 27, 2011 tornadoes,” said Co-op member relations manager Brian Lacy late Friday. “Getting eyes on every situation that creates an outage is the main focus of our efforts this afternoon, because this kind of weather event affects many locations.

“It’s one thing if a substation goes down and we’re able to restore power to 5,000 accounts at once by fixing that single problem. But this situation is different,” he added.

“We have almost 200 individual places that we know of where separate incidents have caused the power to go out across our service area. We have our crews out working in the field, but we know that we’re not going to be able to restore everything as of Friday night. That’s why we’ve called in outside crews in to come and help. Some of them are here already, while others will be here first thing Saturday morning.”

Downed trees across power lines are indeed a widespread result of Friday’s storm, which spared no corner of the county from the brunt of its fierce and sustained winds. “I would estimate that 95 percent of everything we had in terms of damage and aftermath has been wind-related,” said Sartin, “and it’s been everywhere. It’s not from tornadoes, either — just steady, straight-line winds.”

The Co-op posts frequent outage and restoration updates at its Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as at its website (cullmanec.com). A real-time interactive map indicating outage locations and restoration status also can be found online at outages.cullmanec.com.