Storms Rock the Region

KYW Staff Reports

Residents throughout the Delaware Valley were picking up the pieces on Friday morning after Thursday afternoon's powerful storms.

KYW's Al Novack reports that the hardest hit area was Delaware County and parts of Chester County.

Peco Energy reports at the height of the storm there were 215,000 customer outages. As of early Friday morning, Peco says it still had some 155,000 customers without power. Both Comcast and RCN report cable and internet service outages.

Septa says all regional rail service will be operating with one exception -- the R3 Media trains, which operate through Delaware County, are not yet back in operation  because of fallen trees and down power lines. Septa says it is making an all out effort to restore R3 service for the rush hour.

Peco says the repair and restoration of power to some areas may take a few days. But there's good news for airport users -- all operations at Philly International Airport are said to be normal and there are no major delays.

KYW's John Mcdevitt reports the roof was blown off a daycare center in Primos-Secane, Delaware County.

Joanne Drinkard with Aadvark Childcare and Learning says about 150 children from Today's Child Learning Center on the 700 block of Secane Avenue were brought to her daycare center after high winds damaged the roof around 3:30pm.

Drinkard says, "As far as we know, every child is accounted for.  They're scared to death, but they're okay."

KYW's Pat Loeb reports Allen Becker walked to his car, parked next to New Light Beulah Baptist Church at 17th and Bainbridge, to find a terrible surprise.:

"The actuality of it is that the roof actually came off."

A portion of the church roof had fallen onto Becker's car and four others, as the storm tore through, wreaking havoc in the south and west.

An Upper Darby neighborhood just off Township Line was particularly hard it.:

"It sounded like we were under fire, it sounded like artillery, it sounded like machine gun fire."

Elizabeth Schogol says her siding is pockmarked from golf-ball-size hail. Nearby, Laurie Gray surveyed a tree that fell from her front yard, across the street, into a neighbor's house.:

"Their son had just walked in the front door, 20 seconds before it hit, everybody's safe. That's what we keep talking about is that nobody got hurt."

The nasty weather also caused power problems. At the height of the storm, almost 215,000 customers were without service. PECO spokeswoman Kathy Engle says Chester and Delaware Counties seemed to get the worst of it:

"We've been tracing this weather all day so we certainly had our crews mobilized.  We're hoping to get to those outages as soon as we can and be able to respond and restore everyone's power as soon as quickly as possible."

Service was also suspended on Septa's Regional Rails because of the weather.  Service was down on the R1, R2, and R3 lines.

A lifelong south Philadelphia resident says, in 45 years, he's never seen this many tree limbs and branches on the ground.

KYW's Tony Hanson reports trees and tree limbs were down on streets, cars and sidewalks in west Philadelphia. Wires were down, lights were out.  And Ernest Davis watched it happened.

He pulled over in his car and then watched as the world crashed around him.

"First it was like it started raining. And then the hail started coming in, and then this really, really dark cloud came and the wind was so massive. It was just like, trees that have been there for 15 or 20 years was just knocked over. I just moved my car in time and if not, it would have cracked the back of my window all up."

Several streets were closed because of downed trees and wires.  And traffic for the evening rush got off to an awful start.

(Photos by KYW's Tony Hanson)