NOTE: This content is about weather and meteorology, similar to that contained in my WeatherMatrix Blog which ran from 2005-2022 on AccuWeather.com.
We’ve just experienced one of the craziest April severe weather seasons I’ve ever seen in Central Pennsylvania. Typically, severe weather doesn’t hit here until May, and the most common season is late May to early June. I can’t even remember any significant April storms since I moved here nearly 30 years ago, but we just got two big ones here in State College.
The first storms came on April 15 and included accumulating marble-sized hail, which has only happened once or twice since I’ve lived here. A lightning strike hit 400 feet from my house, and minutes later high winds knocked down a tree on my neighbor’s house. Later in the day, I was driving when another storm knocked down a tree 500 feet in front of me. I couldn’t believe it.
If that wasn’t enough, a severe thunderstorm / bow echo / derecho on April 29 knocked down 6-8 power poles on College Avenue, a half a mile from my house, which left half the county, including us, without power for more than 2 days!
The pre-show (last week in March)
On March 24 (I think – not sure of date) an unusually windy day felled a tree at Harner Farm, about 3/4 of a mile from my house. This tree was likely at least 50 years old. The double pine trees on the corner of College. Ave. & Whitehall Road next to the farm were a familiar local sight that had been there forever. You can go years without a tree falling in State College, so this was significant.
The first storms (April 15)
A fast-moving severe thunderstorm passed over my house early in the afternoon. A close lightning strike hit at 1:32 p.m. Then a huge lightning strike hit close by at 1:38, with almost simultaneous thunder that was so loud, the house shook and things fell off the shelves.
I caught the strike on various webcams and also my GoPro, though I had it in the wrong zoom level so it didn’t catch the whole thing.
Later, I realized I caught the complete strike hitting the ground on another security camera, and you could even see the smoke it left behind.
From there I walked out in the field and found a tree ~400 feet away that had been split, though the damage wasn’t conclusive. I wandered around the field for a while; if it wasn’t that, I don’t know what it was.
As if this wasn’t enough, I was driving later the day during a different thunderstorm, sitting at a stoplight, when I witnessed what I thought was another tree falling down during high winds. It turned out to be a major branch of a tree, which fortunately fell opposite the power lines on College Ave, at Airport Road.
The derecho (April 29)
Roughly two weeks later, a derecho (line of very severe thunderstorms) ripped through western Pennsylvania, gusting to 71 mph at the Pittsburgh airport and 79 mph at Latrobe. It had weakened when it hit State College, but the airport gusted to 62 mph, which is very unusual. Trees and power lines were reported across the county. In nearby Cambria county, the NWS said 110-120 mph winds knocked down a cell phone tower.
At 6:51 p.m., the high winds crossed College Avenue, breaking 7 power poles that were main lines into the county and dumping them onto the road, half a mile from our house. Our power went off just before the high winds hit our house. It was windy at the house, but not record breaking.
The power wouldn’t come back on for more than two days. That was the longest power outage I had experienced since I was in Raleigh for Hurricane Fran in 1996, when we lost power for at least that long.
After I saw a rumor of a powerline down nearby on my neighborhood’s Facebook Group so I took a drive shortly after the storm to see what happened. I was shocked to see 7 poles snapped off at College Ave. I took some pics, uploaded them to Facebook and texted them to my boss and, since she lived near the damage, asked her to take a video for our news coverage.
On May 1, Centre County 911 posted on Facebook that the storm resulted in more than 767 phone calls related to the storm, one of the highest call volumes on record, with 643 calls on April 30, the day after the storm.