Neighbors helped clean up debris as kids (below) played on downed trees.
Clap, boom, crack, thud, crash! Those were just a handful of the many sounds residents of Akron Street in Frankford heard one evening last week when Mother Nature decided to turn their neighborhood into an Olympic-sized game of pick-up sticks.
Although thunderstorms wrought havoc throughout Northeast Philly and much of the Delaware Valley at around 6 p.m. on June 23, the 5100 through 5300 blocks of Akron St. were hit particularly forcefully.
Torrential rains and high winds combined to uproot more than a dozen mature trees, many of which had stood higher than 50 feet and measured several feet around at the base. The storm sheared utility poles, brought power lines to the ground, tore up sidewalks, crushed cars, damaged rowhomes and rendered residential blocks impassable. The neighborhood lost power for hours. By Friday, sections of the street still looked like a war zone as the roar of chainsaws and industrial wood-chippers echoed from porch to porch.
“I was feeding my grandchildren, and the power went out,” said Antoinette Williams, a 13-year resident of 5100 Akron. “I wasn’t too scared; I figured it was just another storm, and it’ll pass like they all do. I never expected this. It was chaos.”
Donald Scott has lived on the block for 62 years and had never seen anything like it.
“Not like this, no,” Scott said. “The trees, they went down like dominos.”
Some suburban communities had it pretty bad, too. According to published reports, 610,000 homes and businesses lost power in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey, including about 260,000 PECO customers. By Friday, about 14,000 PECO customers were still without power, mostly in Delaware County.
Akron Street neighbors said that PECO showed up on their block on the morning after the storm, which lasted less than a half-hour despite the high intensity. Power was restored after about 15 hours.
Scott and his elderly mother were on their porch watching the lightning show in advance of the deluge when the winds really started kicking up, so he led her inside. A short time later, large trees on the well-shaded block began to sway violently and creak loudly.
Scott’s neighbor, a man named Randy, hurried outside to move his car to the end of the block where there are fewer shade trees.
“No sooner did he move his car, within a matter of seconds a tree came down right where his car was,” Scott said.
Other motorists weren’t so fortunate. Multi-ton tree trunks flattened several parked vehicles. A United Parcel Service driver happened to be driving down Akron Street when a falling limb took a chunk out of his big brown truck.
“A couple of seconds later, and he would’ve got it. God was with him,” Williams said.
“He was very lucky to get out alive,” Scott said.
At one point, lightning struck a wooden utility pole, which snapped in half, dragging live wires to the ground.
“You could hear the cracking but you didn’t realize how many came down until it was over. The rain was so hard and wind so strong you didn’t realize how much damage was being done,” Scott said.
In the aftermath, some neighbors did their best to clear branches and limbs, using some of the stronger segments to prop up larger, teetering trunks. Perhaps naive to the potential danger, or emboldened by it, neighborhood children froliced freely amid the debris, using a particularly large fallen tree as a jungle gym and the busted sidewalks as a bicycle obstacle course.
Neighbors said that various news organizations had visited the street. After one television crew stopped on the 5200 block of Akron, the city dispatched a clean-up crew in short order. However, by Friday afternoon, the 5100 block still looked virtually untouched while workers from the Streets Department had just begun slicing up limbs on the 5300 block.
And a few residents were outside with household brooms and dustpans, scooping up twigs and wood chips, trying to lend a hand in the clean-up. ••
The aftermath: Thunderstorms wrought havoc on Akron Street in Frankford on June 23. The storm sheared utility poles, downed power lines, crushed cars and damaged rowhomes.
The aftermath: Thunderstorms wrought havoc on Akron Street in Frankford on June 23. The storm sheared utility poles, downed power lines, crushed cars and damaged rowhomes.
The aftermath: Thunderstorms wrought havoc on Akron Street in Frankford on June 23. The storm sheared utility poles, downed power lines, crushed cars and damaged rowhomes. MARIA POUCHNIKOVA / TIMES PHOTOS
