PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A hot, humid day was washed out by severe thunderstorms on Thursday, taking down trees and power lines and leaving tens of thousands of homes and businesses across greater Philadelphia in the dark.
A tornado warning, which was issued for Chester, Delaware and New Castle counties by the National Weather Service around 5 p.m., lasted around half an hour as heavy winds and rain battered the region.
Trees were ripped from the ground, tree limbs fell on roadways, and many roofs were damaged.
In Bala Cynwyd, the roof of the insurance company where Candice Taylor works, near City and Belmont avenues, was damaged in the vortex.
“We were in the office, there were only a few of us in and we heard a loud bang, and all of a sudden the roof partially blew off parts of the roof toward the west end of the building and it blew into the parking lot as well,” she said. “There are trees and debris all over the place. There are a couple of toppled trees in the parking lot.”
She said the company will file a claim.
One of the trouble spots that remained Friday morning was Ridge and Monastery avenues in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. A tree on a front lawn snapped, and a massive branch crashed onto Ridge Avenue and four cars below.
“The way the wind shear was going where we were, and it was moving in different directions all during the storm — this poor tree didn’t have a chance. Nor did the people whose cars it wrecked,” one woman said.
Three of the vehicles were parked along the side of the road, but a red Jeep was on the northbound side. The driver became stuck when the tree fell, but he managed to escape through the trunk, neighbors said.
In East Oak Lane, a child was hurt by a falling tree.
In Westtown Township, Chester County, there was a house fire on Westbourne Road that officials said was weather-related, possibly due to downed electrical wires or a lightning strike. No injuries were reported.
There was a partial outage at Jefferson Abington Hospital in Montgomery County. The ER was not affected by the outage, and power was fully restored Thursday night.
Some events were also disrupted. The Juneteenth block party at the African American Museum in Philadelphia wrapped up earlier than scheduled on Thursday. And, concert-goers had to evacuate the Barefoot Country Music Festival in Wildwood because of lightning.
Power restoration
It also made for a busy afternoon and evening for PECO, as it reported more than 327,000 customers affected at the height of the outages.
Due to the “extensive impact” of the storms, PECO says its efforts to get everyone back on the grid will last through the weekend. Crews from as far as Illinois are pitching in.
PECO says it understands “how disruptive it is to be without power” and apologizes for the inconvenience.
Many customers without power are trying to find a way to preserve the contents of their fridge until the lights come back on.
“I’m getting ice and I’m going to try and save my freezer stuff,” said Cindy Barton of Bryn Mawr as she left the Ardmore Park Beverage Company Friday.
“[There's] a lot of meat because I bought some meat last week. And you know, that’s expensive.”
Barton said she'd been without power since the severe thunderstorms hit Thursday evening. “PECO, all they do is they say we have a crew out," Barton lamented. PECO couldn't tell her when her electricity would be restored. “I don’t know. It might be a couple days, who knows?” she said. "There are a lot of trees down in our neighborhood.”
At one point Friday morning, PECO said it was no longer giving customers estimated times for their power to be restored because so many of them were still without power.
As of Friday evening, the estimated times are back, but some won’t get power back until Monday evening.
Zafar Abdullah of Wynnewood was also buying ice to save the contents of his freezer. “The salmon, the steaks and the seafood, I don’t know about that. We’ll see about that.”
As Barton and Abdullah dealt with the aftermath of the ferocious thunderstorms, David DeBeary, a delivery driver for the Arctic Glacier Ice Company, knew his job had more significance.
“It’s a privilege to be able to supply people with ice that don’t have power so they can keep all of their refrigerator items fresh," he said. "It was really pretty bad with all of the trees down and power lines down.”