Mother...Nature!

(Broken power pole in foreground)

The Philadelphia region was pounded with thunderstorms early Saturday. In some regions, the storms caused heavy damage.

Clean up efforts were still underway after the Saturday storms devastated Upper Merion Township. Some neighborhoods were hit really hard.

"The situation that these customers are seeing is like nothing that I've ever seen before," said an electric company spokesman.

Several homes were deemed uninhabitable after the storm caused massive trees to land on them. Work went on cutting tree limbs off of power lines.

Winds overnight snapped utility poles like toothpicks. Transformers were sent crashing down leaving families without power.

Nearly 26,000 PECO customers were without power during the height of the storm. PECO worked continuously to restore power for those customers.

Thunderstorms left a trail of debris in their wake, but miraculously did not cause injuries, although some roads were closed and there was a lot to clean up.

Violent thunderstorms packing 60 mile-per-hour wind gusts rolled through the region, uprooting trees, knocking down limbs and pulling down electrical lines.

By 9 p.m. Saturday, 1,500 electric company customers in Montgomery County still did not have power. At the height of the storm, there were 15,000 outages in Montgomery County. Most of the outages were due to circuits tripped by lightning and trees or tree limbs being blown into or falling onto power lines. A total of 46,000 PECO customers lost power, some only momentarily, and 26,000 was the greatest number of outages at any one time.

There was no evidence of a tornado.

Some trees fell onto homes in Upper Merion Township and there was a report of a house catching fire after being struck by lightning.


It was quite the thunder-boomer that blew through, accompanied by a fairly substantial amount of hail.

After the power went out at "La Casa de Camo" (my rambling estate) I went on a little reconnaissance mission; I wanted to ascertain where the problem was.

When I went out to the road that runs along one side of my property, there were a number of trees down, but on the other side of the road. On my side there was only one fairly hefty tree limb that had fallen, right next to my mailbox.

However, the trees that had fallen pulled down some wires, which blew out a transformer. I was without power for about 8 hours, but other than a bit of deadfall on the grounds, my acreage was relatively unscathed.

That was not the case for a lot of people, as the destruction was pretty bad in some places. There were smashed vehicles, in addition to battered homes.

Early on Saturday morning, the power company crews were hard at work, and the municipal workers were cutting up trees...of which many were still down, but at least the roadways were (relatively) clear.

I took a little stroll around the neighborhood on Sunday, and the trees surrounding an apartment complex about ¼ mile from my place were particularly affected. Several trees were down, some of them having smashed vehicles in the parking lot.


I'm glad my Harley stays in the garage...