LITCHFIELD — No tornado touched down Tuesday, but multiple witnesses described the thunderstorm that knocked down trees along Route 202 as something out of Hollywood.
“It felt like I was in 'The Wizard of Oz,'” Liz Thompkins said of the 1939 film starring Judy Garland.
Thompkins was inside West Street Hair Design at The Cove plaza when the storm barreled through Litchfield and Bantam. Ann Jacquemin, who works at Patty’s Restaurant just up the street, was getting her hair cut at the same salon during the storm.
“All of a sudden it looked like a tornado outside,” Jacquemin said. “It was incredible, like there was so much debris and everything flying around. The lights started to flicker and then they went out completely. It was insane."
The National Weather Service has not officially declared that a mircoburst hit the area Tuesday, but several trees were down not far from the driveway entrance to Lakeview High School and one fell on an outbuilding on the campus.
Across the road at an All-Star Transportation bus parking lot, Director of Maintenance Steve Rosco on Wednesday morning was assessing damage caused by a large tree that fell across the top of two buses. He said the tree also collided with power lines and he was waiting for Eversouce Energy to send a crew to do some cleanup. He noted one of the buses suffered “quite a bit of damage.”
Dan Amarante, a meteorologist for Hearst Connecticut Media Group, said, "Tuesday's thunderstorms contained damaging straight-line winds embedded within pockets of torrential rain. Downdrafts originating in the turbulent center of the thunderstorm can come crashing down to the surface, causing a burst of gusty winds and knocking down numerous trees in the process. These gusty winds were indicated on radar after the National Weather Service had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Litchfield County at 1:33 p.m."
At Love Hearts Bakery, also in The Cove, employee Heather Hughes noticed the sky turning dark before the sky opened.
“It's started downpouring instantly. And then the wind picked up, there were leaves and branches flying around. You couldn’t see outside the window,” she said. “Vicious thunder was happening. Yeah. It literally looked like 'The Wizard of Oz' out there.”
In the next instant, a tree fell across Route 202 and another came down in the small plaza's parking lot. The second tree hit electrical wires, which prompted Hughes to call 911.
According to the witnesses, the storm came through and left in about 5 to 10 minutes, and was isolated to a narrow area. Outside that space, it looked like a normal rain storm.
Power was out for a short time in the nearby businesses and workers closed shop. They were forced to reroute around a closed area of Route 202 in front of Lakeview High School.
Josh Delello, who does maintenance at The Cove, got to work at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to find tree branches and leaves clogging the parking lot. He spent about an hour clearing the lot.
Wendy Costa, who taught art at the former Wamogo Regional High School, now called Lakeview, for 30 years, stopped by Wednesday to see the damage. Standing beside a downed black locust tree, she blamed the unusual weather on climate change.
Costa said she was driving toward a market in Bantam when the storm hit Tuesday. An infrared photographer, she shoots photos that emphasize the sky.
“So I'd gone around photographing these crazy clouds,” she said of the thunderstorm.