Sean Kirst
Thunder and lightning like mortar: In Syracuse, it's been 15 years since the Labor Day storm
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Post-Standard photographer David Lassman captured this image, on Labor Day 1998, of an early morning derecho - a rolling chain of deadly thunderstorms that caused epic damage throughout Central New York. (David Lassman | dlassman@syracuse.com)
By Sean Kirst
skirst@syracuse.com
It's only a few days short of 15 years since greater Syracuse awoke on another gray Labor Day - Sept. 7, 1998 - to a community stunned by a fierce derecho that killed two men, toppled trees and tore down wires. Sean Kirst, a columnist for The Post-Standard/Syracuse.com, wrote this piece for the morning of Sept. 9, 1998, shortly after the storm:
This was no thunderstorm. That word does not describe it. Ron Babbitt knew that right away, inside his apartment on South Geddes Street. The wind and rain, through the window, swept pictures off his wall. The roar of the storm was almost deafening.
He awoke Monday to learn the wind had destroyed the storage room next to his bedroom, blowing one whole wall at least three houses away.
"This was a twister, " Babbitt said, as he picked through the debris. "It had to be."
The National Weather Service is calling the storm "a derecho, " a fast-moving assault line of potent thunderstorms. The winds were tornado-level, from 70 mph to as high as 110. Falling trees and wind-blown debris claimed the lives of two men - Beryl Stone and John "Butch" Perry - at the state fairgrounds.
"A derecho can actually be worse than a tornado, because it cuts a much larger swath, " said Bill Hibbert, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
There is a power to the word that says something we all know: Syracuse has never seen another explosion of weather quite like this event we're already calling the Labor Day storm.
It started with bursts of color, which masqueraded as heat lightning. Then you heard the rumble of thunder, and the breeze turned into a strong wind, which built into a monster storm that shook the whole house. Lightning flashed like mortar fire. The rain was so intense it turned windowsills into waterfalls.
A thunderstorm? Try telling that to Luz Sanchez and Maria Banah, the upstairs and downstairs residents of a duplex on Niagara Street. Luz had just gone to bed when the wind came up, and her windows began exploding as if someone was throwing rocks, while paintings and family pictures flew off the wall.
Downstairs, Maria ran to collect her four children. Water from shattered windows poured across the floor. The lights went out and her little laundry room burst into flame, destroying two loads of clothes and all her children's shoes. Maria and Luz ran outside with their children, then ran to a pay phone to call 911.
Aftermath: A fallen tree and a crushed automobile, Judson Street, Syracuse, hours after the Labor Day storm, 1998.David Lassman | dlassman@syracuse.com
"I grew up in a place where we had hurricanes," said Jaime Santos, a carpenter helping to repair Banah's apartment. "I never saw anything like this, like all that lightning." And he opened and shut his fingers, to show a constant burst of light.
Downtown, Dan Fleet was in the lobby at the State Tower Building, his second night of duty doing all-night maintenance. He watched, warm and dry, as the rain began to fall, figuring this was an everyday storm.
"I knew something was wrong, " he said, "when the rain went horizontal."
Fleet pressed back against the wall, bracing as the revolving door strained and groaned against the wind, waiting for the door to burst free and crash inside.
It didn't. The door held. Fleet ran to call his wife.
A microburst? Maybe. But the word hardly describes majestic trees tossed like corn husks across Onondaga Park, or brick chimneys turned into confetti.
It doesn't capture what happened to the dream of Shirley Morris, who lived in rental homes until three years ago, when she finally managed to buy her own place.
She bought a wooden house on Seymour Street. At 1 a.m. Monday, Shirley was doing laundry in the basement, joined by a 3-year-old grandson who couldn't sleep. The lights died. Shirley grabbed the child's hand and made for the stairs.
Her 16-year-old son, Brandon, was settled into bed when the hard rain soaked his blankets. He stood up to remove a fan so he could close a window, and as he stood there an entire tree came crashing through the wall. It took out his bed as it crumpled the front half of the house.
Shirley did not seem depressed about it Tuesday. "That's material stuff, " she said, of the house crushed by the tree. "We're alive. We got out."
In Central New York, in the aftermath, she speaks for all of us.