{"id":198324,"date":"2026-05-20T23:15:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/198324\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T23:15:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:15:56","slug":"severe-storms-moving-through-lehigh-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/198324\/","title":{"rendered":"Severe storms moving through Lehigh Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Severe thunderstorms moved across the Lehigh Valley late Wednesday afternoon, bringing high winds and power outages.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the storms produced wind gusts as high as 60 mph, according to the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n<p>The wind downed tree limbs and power lines, causing thousands of power outages. As of 5:50 p.m., PPL was reporting nearly 6,000 customers without power in Lehigh and Northampton counties.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the outages were in the Bethlehem area, with around 1,400 on the city\u2019s west side alone. Lower Saucon Township had about 1,500, <a href=\"https:\/\/omap.prod.pplweb.com\/OMAP#pg-tabular\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">according to the utility\u2019s outage map<\/a>.\u00a0Met-Ed was reporting around 300 outages in Northampton County.<\/p>\n<p>In Allentown, lightning reportedly sparked a fire in the roof of an apartment building, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/LehighValleyBreakingNews\/posts\/pfbid02GvGV1exvLz7bR3AZSgCZRB9vxBsn3s9kAF3Zt5AjxtqVu6uetsLZ6TKpjmzns6n7l\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">according to the Lehigh Valley Breaking News Facebook page<\/a>. The fire on the 600 block of North 22nd Street was reported just before 5:30 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>As the storms moved through, they prompted several severe thunderstorm warnings.\u00a0A severe thunderstorm watch remains in effect for much of eastern Pennsylvania through 9 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>The storms come as a cold front moves through the region, breaking the 90-degree weather of the last several days.<\/p>\n<p>This is a developing story. Check back for updates.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Severe thunderstorms moved across the Lehigh Valley late Wednesday afternoon, bringing high winds and power outages. Some of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,433,182,139,434,28,432,1133],"class_list":["post-198324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-lehigh-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-northampton-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-top-stories-tmc","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}