JAMESTOWN – The Jamestown area – along with the rest of Western New York – was busy cleaning up Monday after a strong wind storm swept across the region Sunday afternoon and early evening.
The High winds began moving into the area Sunday morning, and by 4 p.m. the winds reached the height of their power with strong gusts blowing over trees and knocking down limbs, creating widespread outages in various pockets across Chautauqua County.
The National Weather Service in Buffalo had issued a high wind warning over the weekend and said some wind gusts were expected to reach as high as 50 to 65 miles per hour throughout the day. The NWS reported Monday that the highest recorded wind gust in the region for Sunday was in Fredonia at 69 mph at 8 p.m.
In the Jamestown area, power was knocked out in several different areas of the city and nearby Celoron and Falconer, with crews and supervisors from the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities working through the night to return power. The BPU Water Division advises that water customers may notice widespread discolored water as a result of the outages.
By 10:30 a.m. Monday, the BPU noted that while the majority of its customers are back in power, it still had areas in which there was no electricity, mainly due to major tree damage on wires.
“As trees are cut and moved out of the way, our crews can continue to replace power lines in these sporadic areas,” explained BPU communications director Rebecca Robbins. “Each crew is working one situation at a time, and we have other employees out investigating. We hope customers who remain without electricity can be assured that we are at work and will be at work until everyone is restored.”
National Grid also reported widespread outages in nearly every service area of the county, with the largest number of people affected in the town of Ellery, Harmony, and North Harmony. But there were also smaller outages reported in the Frewsburg, Kiantone, Busti, and Gerry – along with nearly every other township in the county.
Crews with National Grid are expected to continue to work on restoring power to those areas Monday morning and afternoon.
In addition to the high wind, heavy rainfall also fell at times during the day on Sunday and the showers are expected to continue Monday as crews work to restore power.
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