The National Weather Service in State College didn’t have any evidence of a tornado sweeping through the area Thursday afternoon, though meteorologist Rob Radzanowski said much of the area experienced 60-65 mph winds, knocking down trees and power lines, with some places even briefly losing power.

The McKean County 911 Center was inundated with calls beginning around 5:40 p.m. Those calls included trees down on a house on East Main Street in Bradford and along U.S. Route 219, power outages throughout the City of Bradford and surrounding area, trees down on West Washington Street and various power outages.

As thunderstorms developed over the lakes, Radzanowski noted they intensified as they spread across the Southern Tier of New York and into Pennsylvania. In fact, Radzanowski said there may have even been places that experienced 75-80 mph winds.

“Sometimes when storms interact, they can look similar to a tornado,” he explained.

A motorist reported to The Era that while driving on Route 219 north of Tacks Inn, his vehicle was pelted with debris from the wind and rain.

The 911 Center called in 911 management and the EMA to the center before 6 p.m. and called for county stations to set up incident commands at their respective stations and funnel communications through those stations.

As of 7:15 p.m., West Washington Street remained shut down due to trees in the roadway, and High Street was shut down from Metallico to Owens Way, due to a main transformer that was blocking the roadway.

According to reports, the estimated time of arrival for Penelec to the area was six to seven hours as of 7:30 p.m., when the outage map for the utility reported four separate outages in the Bradford area alone: the first impacting 100-500 customers, another impacting between 20 and 100 customers and two impacting 500 to 1,500 customers each, all of which had expected restoration times of 8:30 p.m.

At one point of the evening, 40% of Penelec’s McKean County customers were without power — over 20,000 people.

Reports continued to come in throughout the evening of trees down blocking roads all across the county.