Rain, wind blast Valleys

The Trumbull County 911 Center was flooded.
& lt;a href=mailto:gwin@vindy.com & gt;By HAROLD GWIN & lt;/a & gt;
and PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITERS
The 4.65 inches of rain that fell Monday, as recorded at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, was the most rain in a 24-hour period since such records started being kept in 1943.
Added to what fell earlier this month, the Mahoning Valley has had 7.76 inches of rain so far this month, good enough for No. 9 on the all-time rain accumulation list for the area, just beating out August 1980 when 7.74 inches of rain fell, according to the National Weather Service.
We've still go a ways to go before we get to the record of 10.66 inches recorded in June 1986, but more rain is forecast for the rest of the week, said Tom King, a meteorologist with the NWS in Cleveland.
It's supposed to rain every day through Thursday, be sunny Friday, and back to rain for the weekend, he said.
"The additional rain could result in further flooding," he said.
Mahoning and Trumbull counties are under a flood watch for today, and the NWS has declared a flood warning for the Mahoning River.
Death and destruction
The rain that fell Monday left a path of destruction and tragedy.
Ten-year-old John Keytack drowned in a ditch at Clermont and Cornell avenues N.E. in Warren.
An F-1 tornado hit Youngstown's East Side, with winds between 75 and 110 mph, damaging several business, and ripping the roof off Youngstown Electric Service Inc., and the Ziegler Tire Co. on Poland Avenue.
Trailers in the Bel-Air trailer park off Belmont Avenue in Liberty Township were tossed around, requiring an injured man to be taken to St. Elizabeth Health Center and causing a woman to be treated for minor injuries at the scene.
The man and woman were residents of the trailer park, where the storm knocked at least two trailers off their foundations, inverted one trailer on top of another, and damaged many others, about 7:30 p.m., according to Fire Chief Michael Durkin.
Unlike the afternoon storm that spawned a tornado in Youngstown, the evening storm appears to have hit the trailer park with 70-90 mph downburst winds, said William M. Comeaux, meteorologist in charge at the Cleveland office of the NWS, based on his preliminary observations after sundown Monday.
"It looks like all the debris pattern, everything right now that I can tell, is all in one direction. I didn't see a whole lot of twisting of the debris," he said.
Several trailers were knocked into one another, and trees and power lines were also knocked down in the trailer park, Comeaux said.
911 center flooded
While emergency crews were working at the trailer park, they learned that the Trumbull County 911 Center In Howland was being flooded and would have to be evacuated. Plans were being made to move the center's operations to a mobile unit outside the building and answer calls using cellular phones, Durkin said.
Comeaux estimated that rainfall ranged between 2 and 4 inches Monday in the Mahoning Valley, depending on the location.
About 66,000 Ohio Edison and Penn Power customers in Mahoning, Trumbull, Columbiana and Mercer counties lost power Monday evening because of lightning strikes and high winds that damaged substations, brought down power lines and snapped utility poles, said Paul Harkey, Ohio Edison's area manager. As of 7:30 a.m. today, power was restored to 38,000 people, he said.
Of the 28,000 without power, 16,000 are in Mercer County, 8,000 are in Trumbull, 2,500 in Mahoning, and 1,500 in Columbiana.
"We've got 100 to 150 people from outside the area working to restore power along with our local crews," Harkey said.
Trees and branches blocked roadways and did minor damage to houses in Niles and Lordstown. No injuries were reported.
Roads inundated
"We have a lot of flooded roads, which is causing a lot of cars to be stuck," mainly in Brookfield, but also in Vienna, Fowler and Hartford, said a Brookfield police officer who did not want to be identified. A few houses were evacuated because of flooding on Budd Street and Yankee Run Road in Brookfield, the officer said.
In Western Pennsylvania, high winds accompanying a midafternoon thunderstorm knocked down trees across a widespread area of the Shenango Valley, closing roads, taking down power lines and causing some structural damage.
The Mercer County 911 Center reported hundreds of emergency calls between about 1:45 p.m. Tuesday, when the storm hit, and 3 p.m. The center was running a backlog of about 200 calls as of 2:50 p.m.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or serious structural damage, although the center did have reports of some trees falling on house roofs.
Volunteer firefighters from Hermitage and Shenango Township were called to help control traffic as crews worked to remove trees blocking roads in their jurisdictions.
Streets closed
Hermitage closed sections of Buhl Farm Drive, Wakefield Drive, Maple Drive and Hazen Road while debris was removed. Virginia Road and Neshannock Road were also blocked for a time.
Shenango Township closed Campground Road, Pulaski-Mercer Road, Hewitt Road and others, again because of downed trees.
In Sharon, a large evergreen tree fell at Sharpsville Avenue and Frank Street, blocking most of Sharpsville Avenue. Carley Avenue was also blocked by a tree. Farrell authorities said they had minimal storm damage.
The National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning for Mercer County, saying that Doppler radar indicated a tornado at 1:41 p.m. four miles west of Farrell and moving at 35 mph toward Farrell, Hermitage, Mercer, Sharon, Sharpsville and Stoneboro.
Downed trees
Trish Yake was cleaning the front bedroom window of her new home at 890 Bechtol Ave., Sharon, when the large oak tree in her front yard suddenly toppled over, crushing her black Pontiac Grand Am parked in front of the house.
She saw it fall, she said, later remembering thinking how windy it was just before the tree fell, taking another, smaller tree with it.
A midafternoon rainstorm with high winds had toppled the tree, one of hundreds that came down around the Shenago Valley on Monday afternoon.
It was quite a welcome to the neighborhood.
"I just moved in yesterday," Yake said.
The storm also knocked down trees in a neighbor's back yard and several trees on the adjacent Sharon Country Club golf course.
In nearby Buhl Park, just across the line in Hermitage, maintenance workers closed most of the park roads because of downed trees or large broken limbs blocking the roadways.
Greenville was inundated with as much as 5 inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service.
"It's pretty amazing. I've been in Greenville for 32 years, and I don't remember the [Shenango] River ever being that high," said Shawn Barker, an operator at the borough's water treatment plant.
During the peak of the storms Monday afternoon, all four lanes of state Route 18 were flooded, said Greenville-West Salem police Sgt. John Webster.