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Friday afternoon storms leave damage in Valley
By Sarah Lehr
GIRARD
John Gramelt of Girard noticed the sky darken Friday afternoon just as the lights started to flicker in his home.
His wife, Laura, didn’t initially hear the storm over the sound of the air conditioning, but when she walked outside afterward, she saw trees down throughout her Beechwood Avenue neighborhood.
“It just came like out of nowhere,” she said.
A storm hit the Mahoning Valley just after 2 p.m. Friday, leaving thousands of people without power. The impact was most acute in Girard, Liberty Township and Brookfield Township.
There was also another storm about noon in the northern part of Trumbull County, near Orangeville.
A spokesman for the National Weather Service in Cleveland said such clusters of storms are common in the summer, due to heat and high levels of humidity.
As of 5 p.m., more than 3,000 FirstEnergy customers were without power in Trumbull County. There were also more than 4,000 people without power in Mahoning County, mostly in the Youngstown area.
By 9 p.m., only 140 First-Energy customers were still without power in Mahoning County. FirstEnergy estimated power would be restored to those customers by 11:30 p.m. today.
Trumbull County still had 5,185 customers without power by 9 p.m., with FirstEnergy estimating restoration between 6 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. for most customers.
The bulk of the outages in Trumbull County were in Girard, Liberty and Brookfield.
The eastbound lane of Mahoning Avenue at Raccoon Road in Austintown was closed for a time to allow FirstEnergy workers to repair a utility pole that was damaged during the storm.
The Gramelts, who live on the 900 block of Beechwood, near state Route 304, were fortunate enough not to lose power.
When John saw the storm approaching, he went outside to tie down the family’s tentlike carport.
“You really had to hang on,” John said. “It was really something.”
He then gestured at his next-door neighbor’s house, where a tree took down a new fence and added: “It’s like a war zone here.”
Across the street, John’s neighbors Chuck and Gloria Herring had several large trees fall down in the storm.
Gloria heard a loud “whoosh” when the storm hit.
Also in Girard, the winds ripped off a portion of an awning at Our Town Motor Sales, a used-car dealership at South State Street.
A Girard police dispatcher said the department received close to 50 calls for help since the storm hit, though there were no reports of serious injuries.
A Trumbull County dispatcher also reported zero fatalities, though she said that, for several hours, the office was “hammered” with calls about downed power lines, blocked roads and trees that had fallen on homes or vehicles.