“It could have been worse. I could have been in the car.” — Quincy Drake
Howling winds bring down trees and power lines across WNY
With crushing impact, gusts of up to 75 mph cause damage across region, cut off power for thousands
The hurricane-force winds that roared through Western New York on Sunday wreaked havoc everywhere — and delivered crushing blows on Hazelwood Avenue in the city.
“I woke up with a bang,” said Richard Pompey, a Metro Bus driver whose 2007 Saturn was damaged by a toppled tree.
The tree fell onto his car, smashing windows, flattening tires and crushing the roof on a blustery day when the highest continuous wind speed was measured at 53 mph and the peak gusts at 75.
“I knew one of those trees came down,” Pompey said, recalling what he thought after he heard the bang outside his East Side home.
Next door to Pompey, Quincy Drake, a city firefighter, did not wake up to the sound of a power pole falling on top of his 1998 Nissan Pathfinder.
“I didn’t hear it at all,” Drake said. Both Pompey and Drake took the blows in stride.
“It’s just a car,” Drake said. “It could have been worse. I could have been in the car.”
Across Erie County, police responded to downed power lines and trees blocking streets. Highway crews worked to repair or remove traffic signals that had Across Erie County, police responded to downed power lines and trees blocking streets. Highway crews worked to repair or remove traffic signals that had lost power or were dangling within a couple of feet of the street.
At one point Sunday afternoon, West Seneca police officers were trying to respond to 30 calls related to wind damage.
The winds kept police busy in the towns of Amherst, Cheektowaga and Tonawanda, as well, but none of these departments reported anything “out of the ordinary,” according to dispatchers in those towns.
More than 13,000 National Grid customers in Erie County were without power during the afternoon, although that number had fallen to just below 5,000 by nightfall. More than two-thirds of the National Grid’s Erie County customers without power Sunday night were in Amherst and Williamsville.
In Niagara County, more than 4,000 customers still were without power Sunday evening, nearly a third of them in Lewiston. Meanwhile, nearly 4,000 were out in Orleans County — half of them in the towns of Kendall and Yates — and nearly 2,000 were without service in Genesee County. The company estimated that service might not be restored in some areas until late tonight.
New York State Electric & Gas, meanwhile, listed 20,000 customers in its Lancaster Division without power, including customers on 82 roads in Hamburg, 72 in Orchard Park and 32 in East Aurora. Also blacked out were some 6,000 customers in Niagara County. By late afternoon, power had been restored to all but 1,200.
In Buffalo, police closed LaSalle Park after officers saw water start to cover the road along the shore. Sections of Route 5 in Hamburg near Lake Erie were closed after waves started crashing across the highway.
The winds accompanied a powerful cold front that crossed into New York at about 8 a. m. The National Weather Service said an intense area of low pressure over Quebec produced the strong southwest winds.
The winds continued through the evening, with damaging gusts in excess of 60 mph, the National Weather Service said.
Meteorologists recorded the peak wind gust at 8:21 a. m. at the airport.
“That’s hurricane force,” said meteorologist Joseph Pace of the National Weather Service office at Buffalo Niagara International Airport. “It’s very unusual, to say the least.”
Meteorologists extended Sunday’s high-wind warning from 6 p. m. to 8 p. m.
Today is expected to be calmer, but still breezy, with a west wind of 10 to 13 mph increasing to between 18 and 21 mph. The winds damaged bus stops, downed light poles and blew roof shingles and debris across the area, as well as scattering garbage totes in some locations.
That kept most people indoors — but not Thomas Tepas, 59.
Tepas was on his second bicycle ride of the day when he reached Delaware Park at 4 p. m. He already had ridden 26 miles and wasn’t finished, he said.
His strategy for dealing with the wind gusts? “I ride as far as I can into the wind and then turn around and get blown home,” he said.
Tepas had the bike trails to himself. The scary moment happened downtown at Court and Pearl streets, when a gust swung the back end of his bike around. “It’s really not that much harder,” he said of riding in the wind. There are times during the ride, he said, when “you just catch the wind.”
After the freak snowstorm in October 2006, the state Public Service Commission faulted Verizon, saying the telephone company relied too much on customers reporting trouble rather than using its field staff to provide assessments. The commission said Verizon took 29 days to completely restore service to about 93,000 customers.
Sunday, Western New York callers to Verizon’s 24-hour repair line were told — after fighting through a series of automated questions — that Verizon hoped to fix any telephone problems within 24 hours but had only a skeleton crew working Sunday.
One of those callers was Lillian Barone of Eggertsville, who used her cell phone to report that her land line was out and learned from a Verizon representative that other customers had similar problems.
“He said, ‘It isn’t just you,’ ” Barone said. “He said, ‘We have had a lot of calls.’ ”
A representative at the center gave The Buffalo News a similar message and explained that the utility has few repair workers available on Sundays.
John Bonomo, a Verizon spokesman in New York City, said Sunday that it didn’t seem as though there were widespread service problems in Western New York.
“It doesn’t appear as though there are thousands and thousands,” he said after sending out internal e-mails for a status report on Western New York. “I can’t imagine it’s something truly elevated or something where we are calling out crews.”
Meanwhile, Barone’s service, which went out at about 8 a. m., was back on at about 3 p. m.
News Staff Reporter Matthew Spina and Niagara Correspondent Mike Kurilovitch contributed to this report.
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