Officials were responding to storm damage in northern New Jersey late Tuesday, including widespread power outages, downed trees and at least one sighting of a possible tornado.
A trained weather spotter reported seeing a funnel cloud at the base of a rotating thunderstorm in Mendham, according to preliminary reports released by the National Weather Service.
In Sussex County, a weather spotter reported “possible tornado damage” at Lenape Valley Regional High School in Stanhope.
About 50 to 100 people were attending a track team banquet in the high school cafeteria as the storm hit, according to officials. Two people suffered minor injuries when an object – possibly a tree – fell on a vehicle, but nobody was taken to the hospital, a sheriff’s office official said.
People attending the event waited out the storm in the gymnasium until emergency crews made sure it was safe to leave, schools Superintendent Paul DiRupo said in an e-mail.
The area had “significant wires down and trees uprooted,” with lesser damage in front of the school, DiRupo wrote.
Sheriff Michael Strada said the county’s emergency management office was at the scene assessing the damage. An alert on the school website said it would be closed Wednesday.
Downed trees and power lines littered the area around the school and a blown transformer less than a mile from the school closed the main road to it for several hours. A DPW truck also went off the side of the road in Stanhope.
A National Weather Service representative said the agency had not confirmed a tornado hit the area.
Marie Raffay, her husband Russ and two sons were at the high school for the banquet when the storm hit.
Marie said she was chatting with a friend and helping clean up in the school’s cafeteria when the windows began to bend.
“The back windows, they kind of like bowed inwards,” the Byram resident said. “At that point we kind of stopped and said ‘maybe we shouldn’t be in here.’”
Still, it wasn’t until she walked into the hallway where her husband and two sons were that she started to realize what happened.
“They were all screaming ‘oh my God,’ look at the dugout.’ The dugout from the baseball field had flipped over,” she said. “There were some tables out there that had umbrellas on them. The umbrellas were gone and the poles were still there, but were all bent.”
Shortly after, emergency officials began to arrive and ushered everyone to the school gym asking with urgency if anyone was injured.
Three of the four entrances were blocked off by fallen trees and power lines, she said.
Marie said a tree had fallen on the car of another family who were leaving the event as they drove away, but that they were both unharmed.
She said emergency officials handled the situation very well, coordinating a safe evacuation and directing people through a maze of downed trees and power lines and was grateful things were not worse than they were.
“In the end we got out and were like ‘wow, that could have been horrible,’” she said.
About 14,000 Jersey Central Power & Light customers were without power in the Morris and Sussex county areas, utility company spokesman Dave Newcomb said Tuesday night.
“There was a line of very severe thunderstorms that moved through the area,” he said. “We are sending all available crews.”
In Hopatcong, police asked residents to stay indoors Tuesday night.
“If you cannot get through keep trying. There are numerous incidents throughout the entire area and your first responders are doing their best to maintain and remedy,” the police department said in a Facebook post.
The harsh weather brought major delays in the area’s airports. At Newark Liberty International Airport, average delays reached nearly three hours.
Forecasters previously issued tornado warnings around the region. Earlier on Tuesday, the National Weather Service confirmed a tornado touched down in Berks County, Pennsylvania. A team from the weather agency also planned to survey damage in Sussex County to determine if that area was hit by a twister.
In Cumberland County, the crew of a fishing boat captured video of what appeared to be a water sprout off False Egg Island Point in the Delaware Bay.
“It was something to experience. Once in a lifetime thing,” a member of the crew from the Bonanza II said on social media.
Jessica Mazzola and Stephen Stirling contributed to this story.
by Noah Cohen (2019, May 28 | Updated 2019, May 29) NJ.com
