At least four people were killed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and hundreds of thousands of customers were without power after severe weather that had torn across the High Plains and Upper Midwest earlier this week pushed into the Northeast and Canada.
A man in Pittsburgh was killed after being electrocuted by live wires, according to the city’s Public Safety Department. The man, whose name was not immediately released, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Another resident, Raymond Gordon, 67, was returning to his home when he was fatally hit by a tree after it blew over, according to the Ross Township Police Department near Pittsburgh.
In Centre County, Pa., a 22-year-old man was also killed after being electrocuted while trying to put out a mulch fire during the severe weather, the State College Police Department said in a statement.
In Greene County, Pa., a passenger in a car was killed when a tree fell on top of it, the Pennsylvania State Police said in its statement about weather-related calls. The passenger, Andrew Celaschi, was struck by a falling tree that was blown over by high winds, the authorities said.
The National Weather Service office in Pittsburgh said on Wednesday that it had crews in Wilkinsburg, a borough in Allegheny County, Pa., looking for potential tornado damage from Tuesday’s severe weather.
The service reported that “a large swath of destructive wind damage” was seen across the area as storms rolled through on Tuesday evening, with gusts as high as 90 mile per hour. The service added that the storms were “stronger than many of the smaller” tornadoes that the meteorologists “typically see in this region, but for a much, much wider area.”
More than 400,000 customers in Pennsylvania were without power as of Wednesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.com, which tracks outages nationwide. Duquesne Light Company said that it was working to restore power to customers without service and that some customers could be without service for about five to seven days. The company was requesting assistance from utility partners.
The company said that the heavy winds had knocked down trees, broken utility poles and prompted more than 20,000 separate reports of hazards.
Officials in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, encouraged residents to stay home as crews with chain saws worked to remove down trees and clear debris from roads on Wednesday.
The same system also rolled through southern Quebec in Canada on Tuesday evening, where a teenage boy was in critical condition in Montreal after a tree toppled and pinned him, according to CBC.com
In Quebec, about 49,000 customers were without power on Wednesday afternoon, according poweroutage.com
The outages came amid severe weather with thunderstorms that whipped up winds and unleashed hail as large as Ping Pong balls.
As of Wednesday, a total of 14 tornadoes had been confirmed in a handful of states, with most of those occurring in Wisconsin on Monday, and others reported in Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma and Utah.
“In terms of the overall coverage of tornadoes, it was certainly not as many as it could have been,” said Nathan Wendt, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center at the Weather Service.
By Wednesday afternoon, the storm activity had pushed offshore. “It should be quiet in the Northeast today,” Mr. Wendt said.
Amy Graff contributed reporting.
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