Late-night storm rips through Philly suburbs.
AMBLER, Pa. (WLVT) - The rain cleared just in time for Halloween trick-or-treating last night. Hours later a powerful storm roared across Pennsylvania, leaving destruction in its wake.
“It came really fast,” said Jason Sobieski, a student teacher at Hatboro-Horsham High School. “Last night we got this tornado warning and within five minutes I could hear stuff hitting the roof.”
Downed power lines, fallen tree branches and other debris littered the roads this morning. More than 107,000 homes in the Philly suburbs woke up to no electricity. As the sun came up, residents began to survey the damage.
An Ambler home on the 100 block of Tennis Ave. was crushed by a tree early Friday morning. A massive oak crashed into the bedroom, pushing an elderly couple sleeping in their bed all the way into the living room. Emergency crews fought pouring rain and 35-to-45 mile-per-hour winds to reach the trapped couple. The rescue took over an hour. The man and woman were both taken to Abington hospital, where the woman was treated and released. The condition of the man was not immediately known.
“Probably going to be a knockdown,” said Dave Ryan, a remediation specialist with The Right Guy Construction, the restoration service assessing the home. “The front of the building’s coming out, the side of the building’s coming out. If you’re in the backyard there’s no left side of the house. It’s pretty bad.”
Several other large trees came down in the storm, though no other injuries have been reported.
At midday PECO was still reporting nearly 1,000 outages in the area.
“Power’s still out,” Sobieski said.
SEPTA suspended parts of its Lansdale/Doylestown, Paoli/Thorndale, Warminster and Norristown High Speed lines. Many businesses remain closed, as well as schools, including Springfield Township, Upper Darby and Wissahickon School Districts and Germantown Academy, as well as Temple University’s Ambler Campus. The Hatboro-Horsham School District opened schools two hours late.
Delaware and Bucks Counties were also among the hardest hit areas. Tens of thousands remain without power in Bucks County. A now-confirmed tornado destroyed eight homes and damaged dozens more in Glen Mills.