As eastern Pa. tornado is confirmed, local family and business describe terror of storm last week

Lehigh Valley residents continued Tuesday to deal with damage from last Thursday’s powerful thunderstorm that cause significant property damage and cut power to tens of thousands of properties.

In eastern Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, meanwhile, the National Weather Service confirmed an EF1 tornado with maximum estimated wind speeds of 90 mph occurred Monday evening in Mahanoy City, about 35 miles northwest of Allentown.

“This is the time of year when we start seeing severe weather,” confirmed meteorologist Bobby Martrich, from Lehigh Valley-based EPAWA Weather Consulting LLC.

The thunderstorm that moved through shortly before 9 a.m. last Thursday brought moments of terror to one Easton family and a business in Phillipsburg. Martrich said velocity scans of the storm and the damage it wrought are consistent with maximum winds of 60 to 70 mph — well into the range of a severe thunderstorm.

“We just had a really strong downburst,” he told lehighvalleylive.com on Tuesday, noting the storm was unusual in that it struck early in the morning — generally morning summer storms are characterized more by loud thunder than by 50-foot trees toppling.

For a time, it was a normal Thursday morning for Adrian Cisneros and his family in Easton’s 700 block of Wolf Avenue. He was resting on the couch as wife Emily Flores was getting their three older children ready for school when the storm struck.

“It started with the rain pretty heavy, and it just got super-worse,” Cisneros said Tuesday. “She was trying to get the kids in the car one by one because of the rain.

“We actually had our 7-year-old Julian and Jeremy, our bigger one, he actually was in the car as well. She went back on the third round to get Josiah and that’s when the tree fell.”

An enormous tree had come down right onto neighbor Sam Marino’s early 1990s Ford F-150 pickup truck with custom wheels, a massive branch crashing through the windshield of Cisneros’ and Flores’ minivan. Jagged wood punctured the glass right where Jeremy, 11, was sitting in the passenger seat.

“I literally witnessed that tree fall on the car and I was straight screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘My babies!’” Flores said. “I didn’t even care about the car, I was more concerned about my kids.”

Cisneros ran out and got the kids back in the house. Marino, next door, said his pickup held up the tree just long enough for the kids to get inside before the tree came down all the way.

“I don’t mind losing the truck,” Marino said. “I consider it very lucky.”

“And yes it’s a collectible,” he noted. “Was.”

The children were unhurt, though Julian was a little shaken up. The power in their home remained out Tuesday because the landlord first had to have an electrician repair damage to the lines tying into the electric meter.

A tow truck came Tuesday for the minivan, amid the rattle of chains and hum of hydraulics. Marino’s pickup remained pinned under chunks of wood, with only immediate cleanup completed to get Wolf Avenue back open to traffic.

“We’re going to struggle, because not only we don’t have a car — he can’t go to work now — I have to throw all the food out that’s in the fridge, and I have four kids,” Flores told lehighvalleylive.com.

Cisneros said he has to pay a $1,000 deductible before insurance will cover the minivan’s damages. Marino only liability coverage.

“It has a good motor and transmission and everything for somebody,” he said, his sunny outlook unswayed. “I’ve had a lot of people stop by wanting to buy it already.”

The storm brought down numerous trees in Bethlehem, as well, dropping limbs that shattered rear windows on cars in the city’s Northeast section.

PPL Electric Utilities reported some 24,400 outages from the storm, with FirstEnergy Corp.’s Met-Ed relaying that 17,000 customers were impacted in Lehigh and Northampton counties and nearby areas and sister company JCP&L describing 25,000 customers affected in New Jersey.

Along with the electrical line crews scrambling to restore service in the days following the storm, tree-removal professionals like those at Aaron Burns’ A.B.E. Lawn & Tree LLC have been working from sunup to sundown trying to handle all the calls they’re receiving.

“It’s just very hectic,” he said during a quick stop for dinner Tuesday, after 66 more calls came in throughout the day. “We’re trying to get to everybody as diligently as possible, and as timely.”

The most pressing calls are those with imminent danger to residents and businesses, he said, and he urged anyone with a tree issue involving power lines to dial 911 first and get the electricity cut, then to call a tree service.

In Phillipsburg, Lori Miller and another stylist each had a customer in a chair at her salon, The Hair Doctor, she’s run for 25 years and which just marked 20 years at 606 Walnut St. on Mother’s Day weekend.

“It was going to be a fully booked day, and it changed in a matter of seconds,” Miller said Tuesday. “We were working on our clients and the sky turned black, it was totally black outside. Then it turned — like the cloud landed on the ground — it was white. And then the winds and the rain and then crash! The tree came through the building.”

One of the customers was glanced by the metal framing of the drop ceiling but uninjured, as was everyone else at the salon. It could have been so much worse, Miller said Tuesday, still clearly shaken by the experience.

“Luckily at that moment I told Pat, go look outside, it’s wicked out there,” Miller said. “She would’ve gotten hit by more of the ceiling coming down.”

“If the tree would have been 4 feet over the other way, it could have been all four of us got hit,” she continued. “The other girl that works down along the wall happened to be in the back room at the time. On a Tuesday there would have been a lady under the dryer and another lady at the far end working on it.”

A tree-removal service responded but said a crane would be needed to remove what had been a healthy tree, and which was simply uprooted in the winds.

“My husband is a saint. He was here Thursday, he and my two sons got the tree of the building,” Miller said of Bruce Miller and their boys, Josh and Michael. “They all came to my rescue that day.”

The section of the salon where the tree came in was walled off Tuesday, but Miller and her staff were able to continue working in the other portion: “And not a mirror broke. Not one mirror broke in a hair salon,” she said.

Miller thinks about the storms with damaging winds and baseball-sized hail that pummeled Texas on Tuesday, leaving more than 1 million businesses and homes without power as much of the U.S. recovered from severe weather, including tornadoes, The Associated Press reported. At least 24 people were killed during the Memorial Day holiday weekend storms.

“I’ve been on my emotion rollercoaster, I’m at my highs and my lows, up and down,” Miller said. “We’re blessed that nobody got hurt, blessed that my husband and my sons came together.”

In the tornado that struck Schuylkill County on Monday, the National Weather Service said it expected to release additional details Tuesday night.

Thunderstorms are going to become more likely in the Lehigh Valley region as we move through the end of spring into summer, weather service meteorologist Lee Robertson said Tuesday: “That’s kind of our prime window of severe weather.”

He urges the public to pay attention to severe thunderstorm warnings issued when winds in excess of 58 mph are forecast, or hail an inch or larger is expected.

“It’s not going to impact everybody that receives the warning, but if people get a warning (they should) move indoors and protect themselves,” Robertson said, noting that in a tornado warning, it’s advised to move to the lowest level of a structure and to get as close to the center of the structure as possible.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.