A tornado warning issued by the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J., expired Thursday at 5:30 p.m. for Delaware County, then a severe thunderstorm warning expired at 6 p.m. with a major cleanup period in store for residents.
There were numerous calls for wires down, limbs down, accidents, pedestrians struck, water rescues, house fire calls.
On Bond Avenue in Upper Darby, a tree fell and damaged a house in the 5100 block.
Township Deputy Fire Chief Dennis Gallagher said two older residents were in the house, when a beech tree which he estimated to be over 60 feet long came down on the back of the house.
The man was uninjured however his wife was in the back of the home when the tree crashed down.
Gallagher said the woman was trapped in a void space following the crash. When firefighters first arrived, a neighbor was holding up a section of the rear roof.
Firefighters used cribbing to support the structure and keep it from crushing the victim.
The victim was transported to Lankenau Medical Center.
“When the house collapsed, it collapsed in kind of a ‘V’ and crews were working to lift a branch and remove her from the void space, apparently she was sitting in the backroom when it happened,” Gallagher said.”There was one bigger tree branch on her they were working to cut and crib before they moved it.”
“It’s a huge tree,” he said. “Ultimately the whole tree came down on the house. she was in the rear addition.” he said. “The crews did a nice job.”
The PECO outage number for Delaware County was up to 74,000 by 5:55 p.m. with emergency crews on duty across the county. That number soon began to slide but not much as more customers went off line as power was restored to others.
Overall, in the entire PECO service area, nearly 300,000 residents of Philadelphia and the suburban counties were without power and many were going to have long nights in the dark.
Another line of storms approached the county about 6:15 p.m., but most of the energy from those storms slide off to the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.
As the front edge of the first squall line passed Philadelphia International Airport, a wind speed of 55.2 mph was measured there. A little more than a quarter-inch of rain was measured at the airport as of 6:15 p.m. with another 0.07 added by 7 p.m.
The temperature peaked at the airport at 91 degrees, had dropped to 89 at 5:30, then as the storm came through fell off to 72 degrees in 10 minutes.
At 5:02 p.m. a large and extremely dangerous tornado was located over Landenberg, or 7 miles north of Newark, moving northeast at 40 mph, the weather service said.
It was called a particularly dangerous situation: “Considerable damage to homes, businesses, and vehicles is likely and complete destruction is possible.”
The Mount Holly office has said nothing more about the potential tornado.
It remains unclear if that tornado extended to the ground. The PECO outage number for Chester County raced by the 40,000 mark by 5:15 p.m., stabilizing in the upper 40s shortly before 6 p.m.