A single storm system tore across nearly the entire width of Upstate New York on Wednesday, triggering tornado warnings from the Rochester area to the Finger Lakes, flash flooding that closed roads in Central New York, and power outages that spread from Buffalo to Syracuse to Rochester before this morning arrived. The reason it hit as hard as it did comes down to timing. Morning storms soaked the ground across Central New York hours before a second, far more dangerous line of storms rolled through that evening, and the saturated soil had nowhere left to send the new rainfall.
Where tornado warnings were issued
Radar detected a tornado signature near Oakfield that prompted a warning covering parts of Monroe, Genesee and Orleans counties, with additional tornado warnings following for Genesee, Monroe, Livingston, Wyoming and Allegany counties as the rotating storms tracked east. Farther east, a separate warning for Cayuga and Onondaga counties went out at 8:41 p.m. after radar indicated rotation over Union Springs near Auburn, moving east at 40 mph.
The National Weather Service office in Binghamton labeled a warning covering nine counties, including Cayuga, Onondaga, Tompkins and Steuben, an extremely dangerous situation capable of producing widespread damage, citing wind gusts up to 70 mph and quarter size hail. A broad tornado watch covering a wide arc of central and southern New York, along with Bradford County in Pennsylvania, stayed in effect until 11 p.m. As of early this morning, the National Weather Service had not confirmed whether any tornadoes actually touched down in New York, and damage surveys were expected to continue into the day.
How many people lost power, and where
The outage numbers depend on which New York region and which hour you look at, since utilities were still updating totals as the storms moved through. In the Buffalo region, National Grid reported more than 17,000 households without power Wednesday evening across Erie, Niagara, Genesee, Orleans, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Wyoming and Allegany counties, with Cattaraugus and Erie counties hit hardest. Around midnight in the Rochester area, more than 12,000 RG&E customers in Monroe County alone had lost power as strong winds moved through. By 6 a.m.
Today, combined outage reports from National Grid, NYSEG and RG&E put the statewide total above 23,000 customers, with wind gusts reaching 76 mph in Seneca Falls and 60 mph in nearby Penn Yan. Farther south, more than 65,000 customers across Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey had already lost power before the worst of Wednesday’s storms even arrived in New York.
Why the flooding was worse than the rain totals suggest
Central New York’s trouble started well before the evening’s tornado warnings. Onondaga County picked up one to two inches of rain in under three hours by mid morning, flooding roads in Camillus and Solvay and overwhelming creeks around Baldwinsville, Cicero, Lysander and Liverpool. None of that water had time to soak into the ground before the evening storm line arrived, a pattern meteorologists call training thunderstorms, where repeated storm cells track the same path and find no dry soil left to absorb their rain…