Severe Storms Hit The Poconos

 

Last Thursday, May 26th heavy storms moved through the Poconos and left a large path of destruction behind them.  Although tornados are rare in the Poconos (there was a small one 2 years ago that took out a barn), there is still a small threat of them and with the tornado season across the county taht we’ve seen already this year, it’s a scary possible reality.

We lost power Thursday night at about 9:00pm – unfortunately for us we have well water so when the power goes out that means no running water, no showers, etc. and you quickly start to realize (especially with 3 little kids) just how much of a necessity having power is.  The next morning we still didn’t have power so we got our son off to school and headed into Stroudsburg(where there was power) and got breakfast and took some photos of what we passed along the way.  There were multiple large trees on lawns, in the road and it seemed like although there was work being done there was so much to attend to that a normal thing like a downed tree in the middle of the road was there for hours.  One of the pictures was taken in front of Penn Hills Resort(which has been closed for awhile) and a cone had simply been placed on the ground in front of where a tree was blocking one side of the road.

Power was not restored for us until Saturday(although we didn’t stay at home), and for other parts of the area until Sunday/Monday.

PPL Electric seemed to handle the situation very well calling in crews from other states to help assist in the process and keeping people up to date on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/pplstormteam

There is another set of storms moving through with a cold front that will be nice(the cold front not the storms) but hopefully it will be on a much quieter scale this time around.

From pplelectric.com:
“Thank you to everyone involved in the storm restoration effort over the past four days.

We appreciate the patience and understanding of all our customers who were without electric service for extended periods of time.  We understand this interruption of electric service can be an inconvenience and a hardship.

After the tornadoes and the first round of thunderstorms, PPL Electric Utilities mobilized all available crews and requested assistance from neighboring utilities and contractors from other states to assist in the recovery.  More than 350 line crews and another 60 tree crews worked around the clock Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, responding to more than 1,400 cases of trouble.

In most cases, the outages involved tree clean up and electrical repairs that required multiple crews for several hours.  Some trouble required crews to work longer than a full day on a single case.  All of the work needed to be well coordinated and very deliberately completed to ensure the safety of workers and the public.

About 100,000 customers were restored in the first 24 hours, then additional storms through the weekend added to our workload. PPL Electric restored service to about 175,000 customers over the four-day period.  Additional work will continue for the next several days, as temporary repairs are made permanent and other trouble is addressed that did not involve a power outage.

PPL Electric thanks the crews from Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland, Tennesee, and Kentucky who came to assist in the storm recovery work.”