An Historic Storm hits an Historic Place…
We pulled a radar image shortly before 10 PM from the first Squall Line that hit the Erie Lakeshore. A squall Line is an intense, usually narrow band of thunderstorms that delivers intense weather along their path, including heavy precipitation, hail, frequent lightning, and strong straight-line winds.
You can also see the purple area curving or forming what meteorologists call a bow echo, which is an area of even stronger winds in the squall line. Waves of lines like this continued to hit the area after midnight, and the National Weather Service has classified the damage as caused by 80 mph straight-line winds. That is the force of winds of a Category 1 hurricane or an EF0 tornado. The difference is that the winds are linear, not rotational like a tornado, but as stated, as strong as a low-end tornado.
A few pictures at the historic Erie Cemetery show this phenomenon. The pictures were taken looking west from Chestnut Street, and if you look at the way the trees have fallen, they fell from right to left or north to south as the squall line pushed the intense winds in that direction as it climbed the hill up to West 26th Street. Another thing that can contribute to the wind speed is the fact that the wind can accelerate as it moves up in elevation.
So this was a double whammy, and if you heard the typically described “freight train” sound many times attributed to a tornado if you were affected by the squall line, keep in mind that if you crank any type of wind, hurricane, tornado, or straight line up to that speed, it’s going to make a lot of noise.
This is one of the most intense storms to hit the area in recent memory. The Erie Millcreek storm of November 5th, 2017 was a combination straight-line wind/EF1 tornado with accompanying flooding. It appears from current observations that this week’s storm affected more people (being in the city itself primarily) and inflicted more damage than that tornadic storm of 2017…