A severe thunderstorm claimed the lives of two people and knocked out power for 300,000 others in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
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According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, just before 5:15 p.m. local time, wind gusts of 71.3 mph were reported at Pittsburgh International Airport. The National Weather Service confirmed it was the third-strongest gust ever reported from the airport.
In a statement on its website, Duquesne Light stated that its crews were working to assess the damage caused by the strong winds, which knocked out power for thousands.
Fellow electric provider, First Energy, reported that 143,000 customers throughout Allegheny, Westmoreland, and Washington counties had outages as of 7:30 p.m.
Along with the extensive power outage, the severe thunderstorm caused damage on the ground. Pittsburgh Regional Transit posted on X that the city established multiple detours due to road conditions. Several bus routes were affected, while rail services experienced delays of more than 30 minutes.
Among the damage was a large fallen tree located on Shady Avenue in Squirrel Hill. Another tree also fell in Fox Chapel on Guyasuta Street. Several other trees were knocked down in Allegheny Commons.
A traffic light also fell just outside of Allegheny General Hospital.
ABC 6 Action News reported that two people were killed in the storm. The first was a Pittsburgh man who was electrocuted by live wires around 7 p.m. Another man was electrocuted when he was putting out a mulch fire caused by live wires that were knocked down by the storm.
The National Weather Service Did Not Consider The Severe Thunderstorm to Be a ‘Derecho’
In a statement on X, the National Weather Service stated the severe storm in the Pittsburgh area was not considered a “derecho.”
“Yesterday’s storm is not considered ‘derecho,’ primarily because it lacked periodic measured gusts in excess of 75 mph along the damage swath (keyword: measured,” the statement reads. “This is not to diminish the impact of the experience, however, as it was still a strong bow echo/squall line.”
The National Weather Service shared that a derecho is a widespread, convectively induced straight-line windstorm. It is specifically a family of particularly damaging downbursts produced by a mesoscale convective system (MCS).
The storm had a swath of wind damage exceeding at least 400 miles in length and 60 miles in width. It was a certain radar-observed storm that featured such bow echoes and rear-inflow jets. It also had wind gusts of at least 58 mph along most of its length.
However, it did not include several, well-separated, measured wind gusts of 75 mph or greater.