Another blast of severe weather has added to the clean up for communities. It's the third round of storms in less than a week.

Beginning at mid-morning on July 3, strong storms began moving across Lake Erie and into Lorain and Cuyahoga counties. Video shot by WKYC and photos snapped by viewers (see above) showed the ominous, jet black clouds as they carved their way across the sky.

Winds and torrential rains followed. Numerous areas reported trees down especially in Medina and Wayne counties which were under a tornado warning for about an hour. Storm reports from those counties estimated hailstones between .75 and 1-inch in diameter from the storms.

Vivid lightning streaked across the sky and struck near Cleveland's Key Tower and also hit a transformer at an RTA station near Hopkins Airport.

Lorain County Emergency Management officials reported trees down as well and recorded a wind gust of 60 mph in Sheffield Lake. The official rain gauge for the EMA recorded 1.61 inches of rain from the storms. More than an inch of rain fell in just 15-minutes leading to localized flash flooding.

Power outages have been reported across the areas impacted by the storms. According to FirstEnergy's outage map, most of the customers impacted by Tuesday's storms should already be restored or soon.

But combined with outages caused from weekend storms and the derecho on June 29 hundreds of thousands of people are still without power in Ohio and other states.

AEP, which handles customers in Stark and Tuscarawas counties as well as other portions of central Ohio, reports outages of 284,000 in Ohio from the combined storms. Factoring in AEP's customers in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, altogether the company is working to restore power to more than 655,000.

The heatwave which is helping to fuel the storms is expected to last through the weekend, bringing additional chances for severe weather. 

WKYC-TV