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 Dan Kulbarsh of New Milford stands among the trees knocked down by Thursday�s quick-moving storm. |
From Oklahoma, Smith was pretty certain it was a tornado that ripped down live wires, uprooted big trees and forced police to close Route 7 north from her street to the Gaylordsville border with Kent.
"I heard things snapping, and just as I walked inside the house a tree knocked out our electricity,'' Smith said of the vicious, yet short-lived storm that erupted with a torrential downpour.
Although there was no official confirmation that a tornado had touched down, New Milford police said one had passed through the Gaylordsville section about 2:30 p.m. and had apparently touched down in the Long Mountain area.
There were also reports a funnel cloud had been spotted in Thomaston, but police there had no reports of serious damage.
On Route 7 North, Denise and Dan Kulbarsh were awaiting the brewing storm when the sky turned near black and a roaring wind forced large poplar trees in the yard to bend until they snapped. However, they never spotted a funnel cloud to signal that this was the result of a tornado.
"Just all of a sudden, 'whoosh,' and everything just tipped over,'' said Kulbarsh, who was inside the house while her husband was in the garage waiting to go and pick up their 11-year-old daughter, Lindsey, from camp.
Even though they have a lot of tree debris to clean up, Kulbarsh said she is glad there was no serious property damage and no one was injured. But she expects her daughter might be a bit miffed with her mother's weather forecasting.
"I always tell our daughter that we'll never have a tornado,'' Kulbarsh said.
At the worst of the storm, police closed down Route 7 north of Straits Rock Road to the Gaylordsville border as well as a section of Long Mountain Road north of Hine Road due to dangerous road conditions caused by the extreme weather.
"It was scary,'' said Anastasia Tencza who lives on Long Mountain Road.
"I had clothes out on the line, and then the sky got very dark, so I quickly grabbed them off, and down came the rain,'' Tencza said. She said her section of Long Mountain did not lose power but farther north up the mountain there was far more tree damage and loss of electricity.
"Now it is sunshine,'' she said of the weather about an hour and a half after the suspected tornado strike.
While there were scattered reports of trees down in the Danbury area, only a few towns reported more than a handful of power outages.
About 50 CL&P customers in Bethel, 120 in New Milford and 150 in Ridgefield were without electricity Thursday afternoon. Bethel police said the heavy downpour caused minor flooding at the town's library.
The state's emergency operations center at the State Armory in Hartford monitored the situation, said Philip Mikan, spokesman for state's Office of Emergency Management.
Mikan said the office remained in contact with local emergency management directors and had not heard of serious damage by late afternoon. The state office also had not confirmed by late afternoon that a tornado actually touched down on land, he said.
"There's been some storm damage, which is traditional with thunderstorms -- trees down and stuff like that," he said. "But we've had no confirmed information of anything more severe."
The storms were part of the same weather pattern that caused problems in New York on Wednesday, stranding motorists in flash floods, delaying flights, and knocking out power to more than 50,000 people in the New York City metropolitan area.
That storm also produced a tornado, which touched down Wednesday morning on Long Island, authorities said.
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