UPDATED: April 4, 7:35 a.m.
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The damage from Saturday night's storms is still being felt across the region. Neighborhoods are still in clean-up mode after the tri-state region was blitzed by wind and heavy rain. The National Weather Service has confirmed that at least eight tornadoes touched down in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
One of them is being blamed for at least one death after a building collapsed in Greenwood, a rural community in Sussex County, Delaware. NWS officials say the tornado caused damage to several homes. Delaware State Police said one person was found dead inside a house that was heavily damaged by the storm.
It is Delaware's first tornado death in nearly 40 years.
The National Weather Service has confirmed that six touched down in New Jersey. In Bridgeville, Delaware, and Cinnaminson, New Jersey, cars were overturned and road signs were ripped from the ground. In other parts of Delaware and New Jersey, power lines were knocked down, trees were uprooted, and homes were damaged.
At their peak, storms left 18,000 PECO customers in the dark and about 7,000 PSE&G customers dealing with outages. PECO is warning people not to touch any fallen wires because they might still be live.
On Monday morning, NWS said another tornado was confirmed in Newtown Borough, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The EF-1 tornado, with winds of up to 105 mph, followed a nearly 4-mile path that hit parts of Wrightstown Township, Newtown Township and Newtown Borough on Saturday night.
Lorie Luff said she and her husband, Larry, sought shelter in the cellar of their 1867 Victorian home, near Washington Avenue and Chancellor Street, when they got the emergency weather alert on their phones.
“I told my husband to get away from the door and to come down. And he had just gotten here, and that’s when we heard a snap and our neighbor called and said our pine tree had gone into their house. And then we heard another snap — and it was our pine tree going into our house.”
That neighbor, Mark Craig, said his wife had just opened the back door when the tree came down.
“She was standing in front of the storm door, because it was windy and noisy, and that’s when the tree came down,” Craig said. “Hit the corner of the house and fell down, took out a few windows, and came down, right against the storm door that she was standing in front of.”
The tree that landed on the Luffs’ house stabbed through the roof and into the ceiling, Larry said. They say they’re just thankful no one was in that room when it happened.
“There were branches coming through the ceiling, sticking out on the inside,” he said. “A couple, I could pull right out. And then one, I had to get a saw and cut it off, because it was still attached to the tree.”
NWS officials will continue to conduct surveys in other areas to determine if more tornadoes touched down.