East Coast storm that killed 5 included twister
Cleanup begins; thousands still without power
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — At least one tornado touched down in an upstate New York town during a violent spate ofweather that killed five people on the East Coast, officials said Wednesday.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo toured the hard-hit town of Smithfield, outside Syracuse, where four people were killed and at least four homeswere destroyed in storms Tuesday.
“It looks like literally a bomb went off in a house,” Cuomo said. “We just see devastation everywhere.”
New York victims included a 35- year- old mother and her 4-monthold daughter, who died when their double-wide mobile home was leveled by the tornado, and a man who died with his dog in a house around the corner, Madison County Sheriff Allen Riley told reporters.
Barbara Watson, a NationalWeather Service meteorologist who inspected the Smithfield site, said the tornado that hitwas at least an EF2, the second level of severity on the five-step enhanced F-scale, with wind speeds well over 100 mph.
In Carroll County, Md., northwest of Baltimore, one boy was killed and eight others — none of whomwere older than 15— were injured when they tried to take shelter from tree branches and other debris being whipped around by the wind.
Meanwhile, thousands of people on the East Coast woke up to power outages and a major cleanup operation Wednesday after the storms and high winds.
The storms uprooted trees and tore down power lines across several counties in central New York, as the extreme weather raged from the Ohio Valley and parts of New England through the mid-Atlantic region, police and weather officials said.
Roughly 174,000 people were without power in the Philadelphia region, Pennsylvania utility PECO spokeswoman Jackie Thompson said.
CNN reported nearly 500,000 homes and businesses without power Tuesday, mostly in Pennsylvania and New York state.
Mark Pellerito, a meteorologist for the weather service office in Binghamton, N.Y., reported that the storms in and aroundMadisonCounty“exhibited a lot of rotation,” and tornado warnings were issued during the evening.
The storms had dissipated byWednesday morning, the weather service said.
Pellerito said ground teamswould have to examine the area Wednesday to determine conclusively whether property damage was caused by high winds or twisters.
The severe weather started Tuesday in northeastern Ohio, where relatively weak twisters were reported before the storms spread east along a cold front and gathered strength, Pellerito said.