A report from the weekend’s wild weather and its fallout.
A tree that crushed this car during the microburst storm in Philadelphia remained on top of the car on Monday morning, two days after the storm / Photography by Victor Fiorillo
Saturday started off like any other muggy summer weekend day for millions in the region. In my home, we played Scrabble, enjoyed brunch, and watched some binge-of-the-week that was so good that I can’t recall it. But in the two o’clock hour, things changed – abruptly.
My wife’s phone blared around 2 p.m. with one of those flash-flood alerts that seem to have become much more common. At first, we brushed it off, as one tends to do. There was barely a cloud in the sky. But then, around 2:30 p.m., we were jolted by a thunder crack and, within moments, we couldn’t see out our windows.
“This is what a monsoon looks like,” remarked my wife, who is from monsoon-plagued India. My son noticed that the rain was exactly parallel to the kitchen windowsill, whipping by in horizontal sheets.
We went to the basement door so that we could open it and check the drain in our rear driveway. The drain was working, but the water was pooling up and entering our basement and garage, and we immediately realized that the drains on our next door neighbors’ houses were very much not working, overwhelming our drain. We watched helplessly as trash cans, tree limbs, and 32-ounce Big Gulp cups rushed by in our backyard river.
Amid all of this, the lights flickered. Again, we shrugged it off, because in 20 years in our home in West Philadelphia, we had never had a significant power outage. But then, the lights went off and didn’t come back on. I called PECO, and the automated system informed me that the company was aware of our particular outage, which they estimated was affecting 1,460 households. (Later on Saturday, PECO reported that some 34,000 homes in the area were without power.)
And then? The rain stopped. The sky cleared. My son asked me if I could drive him to work in Delco. I did; a trip that normally takes 20 minutes stretched to 90. This was the first time in his life that he was late to work — I told him to invoke an Act of God clause.
There were trees and power lines down everywhere and streets flooded out, and because of the sudden nature of the storm and the widespread damage, there were no street closure signs, no police tape telling you to go the other way. This had all just happened. I made my way to a restaurant with power, where I charged our laptops and backup phone batteries. My wife retrieved battery-powered camping lanterns from the flooded garage.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker was quick to sign a Declaration of Disaster Emergency, and adjacent Lower Merion Township declared a state of emergency. It was at Parker’s press conference where I first learned a new term: microburst, which was apparently the cause of all this destruction, which wrought the worst havoc on West Philadelphia and South Philadelphia in particular. Still, some, even in those neighborhoods, appeared oblivious. “I know it’s the nature of a microburst,” one Pennsport resident told me on Monday morning. “But I had no idea this happened.”
Our power returned on Saturday night, several hours after that thunder crack. We spent nine hours on Sunday clearing out the flooded garage; today we’ll tackle the basement.
Our damage is minimal, and because most of the important things in our garage and basement were on shelves or in plastic storage containers, we didn’t lose much. Many neighbors within just a few blocks still don’t have power on Monday morning. PECO estimates that number — again, just in my immediate vicinity — to be 60 customers. Some homes in the broader region had their roofs ripped off. I heard anecdotal, unconfirmed reports of cars “floating” down Lancaster Avenue in Overbrook; not far away, cars became submerged in floodwaters.
a resident created a “Caution: Downed Power Line” sign in West Philadelphia the day after the microburst storm
I drove around at 8 a.m. on Monday to survey the situation in my neighborhood. Much like on Saturday, I found closed streets, downed power lines, crushed homes and cars — and not one indication of any kind of official closure. Instead, residents drew “Street Closed” and “Danger: Downed Power Lines” signs on cardboard and hung them up.
On Sherwood Road, cars passed perilously under a tree that had mostly fallen on the street. The way that the tree broke created just enough of a tunnel for a smaller car to fit through, though it’s no telling when the tree will completely collapse.
Victor Fiorillo
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