A line of severe thunderstorms passed through Northern Seneca county early Tuesday afternoon out ahead of an approaching cold front. These storms left significant damage in their wake.
Charles McCann, Director of Emergency Services for Seneca County explains. “From barns collapsing, roofs being peeled off, many many trees that are down, poles that are down, and a lot of wires down. At one point, we had over 4,000 customers without power.”
This damage prompted the National Weather Service office in Binghamton to send out a storm survey team to further investigate the damage. Erik Heden, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, explains what he was looking for. “We look at the pattern of the damage. Not so much how much damage is caused. And for straight line winds, things are kind of fanned out, everything's kind of going in one direction. If we see tornadic damage, we see something called convergence where things are pointing towards each other and we see trees pointing in opposite directions.”
Whenever wind damage is involved, it’s literally a game of angles. I observed a house in Fayette that had little to no damage on the north-facing side, while the west-facing side had significant damage from hail. It’s information like this that the National Weather Service used to confirm that it was straight line wind damage, gusting in the range of 80-90 mph.
