Soon after a severe storm with winds registered at more than 55 miles per hour touched down in Chester County on July 16, the whir of generators began to hum at homes and businesses in a desperate effort to turn chaos into normalcy. 

Tree surgeon vehicles joined public works teams from area municipalities and PECO trucks to form entire fleets of emergency service along sloppy roads that were clogged with debris and overtaken by fallen trees that took down power lines, shut down roads and severely damaged vehicles.

With their access to the internet out, employees from Chadds Ford to Oxford drove to libraries and coffee shops far beyond the damage of the storm, where they booted up their laptops in order to keep up with their workload.

Restaurants and café owners without generators sorted through their refrigerators, determining what food could be salvaged and what could not. 

In all, the fury of last Tuesday evening’s storm left more than 130,000 residents in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and northern Delaware without power, hundreds of down trees and extensive infrastructure damage, with the most severe occurring in Chester County along the Route 1 corridor beginning at Chadds Ford and extending beyond Oxford, where it was estimated that over 55,000 residents were without power – many for the next several days.

The news of the impending storm arrived when the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm watch through 10 p.m. on July 16 that applied to Adams, Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Chester, Dauphin, Delaware, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Luzerne, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia, Pike, Schuylkill, Wayne, Wyoming, and York counties. 

In addition, the National Weather Service also reported widespread wind damage from Upper Bucks County to Somerset and Hunterdon counties in N.J.

In a release it issued on July 18, PECO said that it anticipated that 95 percent of all customers would have their power restored sometime that day, but as of July 19, more than 1,700 PECO customers in the Delaware Valley were still without power, leading the energy supplier to add more than 400 technicians from Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and Virginia to provide assistance to PECO crews in their effort to restore full power to the region. 

According to a PECO outage tracker map on July 22, a total of 123 customers in Chester County -- less than five percent of the company’s 219,833 customers – were still without power. In contrast, 11 outages remain in Delaware County and in Montgomery County.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].