High winds bring weekend of darkness to many near Laurel Mountain ridges

Using candles and flashlights to illuminate their Mt. Pleasant Township home over the weekend and coolers of ice to keep their food from spoiling, Ladonna and Randy Hrabak persevered during the 48 hours they went without power from Friday night to late Sunday.

“We just had (cold) sandwiches to eat,” said Ladonna Hrabak.

On Monday morning, a crew from Penn Line Services of East Huntingdon removed a tree that downed an electrical wire leading from a pole to the Hrabaks’ 200-year-old log house on Route 982 north of Route 31. Two trees snapped from the high winds Friday night, the Hrabaks said.

It was the loudest he’s heard the wind howl, Randy Hrabak said..

“We hear it (wind) when it snows, but it was never that bad,” Hrabak said.

“When you feel it on that (log) house, you know it’s really bad,” Ladonna Hrabak said.

The wind was clocked as high 56 mph at the Joseph A. Hardy Connellsville Airport, just south of Connellsville, at about 4 p.m. Friday, according to the National Weather Service in Moon. They did not have any official readings for the Donegal-Mt. Pleasant area.

The winds that swept down the Laurel Mountain ridges in eastern Westmoreland and Fayette counties was the result of a strong low barometric pressure meeting warm air flowing up from the Southeast, said meteorologist David Shallenberger. That created a “downslope” of air rushing down the mountains, Shallenberger said.

“We had the perfect setup in the atmosphere for it,” Shallenberger said, referring to the wind gusts.

That “perfect setup” ruined a couple’s plans to have their wedding reception Sunday at the Laurelville Retreat Center off Route 982 in Mt. Pleasant Township.

Laurelville officials had to tell the couple that because of the loss of power Friday night in the wooded retreat facility, they could not hold their reception for some 50 people at the center, said Robby Emerson, director of operations and maintenance at the center.

The wedding and reception for Lucie Hernley and Joshua Mellor, both of the Wooster, Ohio, area, was saved when they Scottdale Mennonite Church officials offered their facility for the occasion, according to the bride’s family.

Because of the power outage, some 150 people who had booked weekend retreats at Laurelville had to leave before Saturday night because of the lack of heat in the buildings, Emerson said.

“We did it for safety reasons,” he added.

With the refunds from the retreat and the loss of the wedding reception, the power outage cost Laurelville about $10,000, Emerson said.

A generator provided power for the center’s cafeteria, but the electric pumps that bring water up from the wells were not working, so the only water available came from a gravity flow, Emerson said.

The wind toppled some trees Friday night, including one that blocked the main entrance and had to be removed by a tractor, Emerson said. No buildings were damaged and none of the power lines within the center were downed during the storm, he said.

“It was pretty scary being under those trees” during the high winds, Emerson said.

Randy Hrabak said the wind took down a lot of trees, making a path of about 100 feet long and 50 feet wide.

“It was happening pretty much everywhere” around the ridge in Mt. Pleasant Township, Hrabak said.

Downed trees resulted in the closure of Route 982 between Route 31 and Route 130.

Few roads remained closed to traffic because of debris, according to PennDOT. Route 1007 (Ross Mountain Park Road) remains closed from Umheys Road in Ligonier Township to Route 1002 (Mountain View Road) in Fairfield Township due to downed trees and wires.

While the Hrabaks and the Laurelville areas had their power restored Sunday, West Penn Power reported that as of 6 a.m. Tuesday, 450 homes in Westmoreland County were still waiting for power. Ligonier Township still had 204 homes without power and 65 homes in Unity were in the dark. Half a dozen other communities were the power went out had fewer than 30 homes waiting for the power to be restored.

Only five homes in Fayette and Allegheny counties were still without power Tuesday morning.

At the peak of the outages over the weekend, there were about 40,700 West Penn Power customers without service in Southwestern Pennsylvania, a company spokeswoman said. Crews worked throughout the weekend to remove downed trees off power lines and restore service.