207. Getting their second wind - - -

The National Weather Service is now reversing itself and confirming three tornadoes in the Louisville area yesterday, one in town just east of downtown (where I live) along Lower Brownsboro Road (US 42) around 7:00 pm, and two others, one on either side of North Preston Highway (KY 61) north of Shepherdsville and south of Hillview, in Bullitt County. All were ranked at approximately 85 miles per hour, which is at the bottom of their ranking schedule.

As a note, the ones in Bullitt County followed just a little south of the same path taken by a tornado on Primary Election Day, May 28, 1996. That one was much stronger, starting on top of Brooks Hill and sweeping down into the low-lying areas along Blue Lick Creek and I-65 to the east. Many of the polls in that part of the county went without electricity for some time and closed without a number of people being allowed to vote. The law at the time read that those in line at 6:00 pm, the prescribed closing time of the polls, could remain in line but that all voting would cease at 7:00 pm.

Because of the delays that day (some of which were caused by too few machines in particular polls and were totally unrelated to the climactic events), the voting-times law was amended in the 1998 Kentucky General Assembly. The 1998 Kentucky Acts of the General Assembly, Chapter 4, Section 1, rewrote the statutes to allow that anyone in line at 6:00 pm would be allowed to vote before the polls were to be closed, and the polls would remain open until that last person in line at 6:00 pm voted, irrespective of the time. The new law went into effect on February 17, 1998.