Like it or not, cold weather here to stay

Photo

The Vindicator/Geoffrey Hauschild A Motorist moves out of their lane to avoid hitting a tree that fell through a fence and onto a roadway at ?Calvary Cemetary? on Wednesday afternoon.

By Jon Moffett

Wednesday’s wacky weather was precursor to traditional winter season in the Valley.

YOUNGSTOWN — Despite what the calendar reads, winter is here.

While the season doesn’t technically start for a little more than a week, Mother Nature made her presence known with a bevy of weather shifts Wednesday.

Temperatures peaked in the lower 50s during the morning commute, and it appeared to be an unusually warm December day. But the rest of the day was highlighted by sunshine, rainstorms, strong winds and some sleet – almost simultaneously.

In a 15-minute span, it wasn’t unusual to witness sunny skies, followed by heavy downpours and finished off overcast skies and back to sunshine.

But it appears as if the cold weather will win out and is here to stay.

“In general, a long low-pressure system caused blizzard conditions in the Midwest and is coming through,” said Brian Mitchell, of the National Weather Service in Cleveland.

Mitchell said the cold front will continue to hover over the Valley and slight snowfall should be expected.

While the weather fluctuated constantly, one constant was high winds sweeping across the region.

Mitchell said winds were clocked at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport at 56 mph. Throughout Ohio, the weather service warned of wind speeds that could top 60 mph.

“The winds will still be pretty gusty at times,” Mitchell said. “But they should slow down some.”

Late Wednesday, a First Energy spokeswoman said that many customers were without power because of the storm. That included 500 Columbiana County customers; 4,600 in Mahoning; 3,000 in Trumbull; and 1,000 in Mercer County, Pa. She could not pinpoint the exact locations as the utility company was still in the midst of its storm response.

But in Champion Township, Champion Presbyterian Church opened its doors as a shelter for residents who lost power, according to Trumbull County 911.

The winds were so bad that crews from the city parks department spent several hours clearing limbs and brings strewn about the streets and other properties.

A large tree blew over and fell through a brick and wrought iron fence lining Calvary Cemetery on the corner of Belle Vista and Mahoning avenues. Large parts of the tree fell into the eastbound lane of Mahoning, halting traffic momentarily.

Dave Sturtz said he and other employees of the parks department spent a large part of the day with a chainsaw and a wood chipper clearing the street.

“This is a main road, so we try to get it cleared away first,” Sturtz said. “Then we’ll focus our concentration on some of the smaller and back roads. There is plenty of work to do.”

Trees and power lines were downed throughout the area. High winds were blamed when Mahoning County’s Industrial Road complex lost electric power, telephone service and computer access at about 12:15 p.m. Power was restored there at 2:20 p.m.

That complex includes the offices for the county engineer, sanitary engineer, emergency management, dog warden and soil and water conservation personnel.

The county’s courthouse and administration building in downtown Youngstown experienced momentary power outages around the same time the power went out on Industrial Road.

The Boardman branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County closed at 3:30 p.m. after a power outage. Normally that branch would have remained open until 9 p.m.

Phone service failed at the Austintown library branch about 12:30 p.m. and was still unavailable as of late afternoon, but since the library’s power stayed on, it remained open as usual.

Sturtz said the best advice during high winds is to be extra alert and use common sense.

“When there are high winds, you start to get things falling down,” he said. “For any line that is down, what you should do is treat it like it’s live, because it may just be a cable line, but somewhere down the line there is a live power source.”

XVindicator Reporter Peter H. Milliken contributed to this story.

jmoffett@vindy.com