‘I could not outrun it’: Rome starts long recovery after winds flatten Upstate NY city

Rome, N.Y. -- Just minutes before a powerful storm began ravaging the streets of downtown Rome, Joey Long, of Taberg, noticed the shift in weather as he was on the return trip of a Door Dash delivery.

He decided to pull over in the parking lot of the Grand Union grocery store on Erie Boulevard West to wait out the Tuesday afternoon storm.

“I could tell what the formation was, and I was a little concerned about it because it was coming in fast,” he said Wednesday. “But there was there was nothing I could do. I could not outrun it. I couldn’t. I just had to wait it out.”

He sat in his truck and tried to Facetime his wife. Then the truck started to lift off the ground.

“And it lifted me about a foot off the ground or so,” he said. “I thought I was going to flip my truck, but then it grabbed a hold of the front end and spun it. I did like a 360 and ended up four parking spots away from where I parked.”

Tornado-force winds reaching 79 mph hit nearby Griffiss Air Field at about 3:35 p.m. Tuesday. Those winds swept through much of Rome, hitting parts of downtown along George and Liberty streets hard.

A home for seniors lost its windows and a wall and was closed. A former Sears gas station, a focal point of the city, was destroyed. The city’s iconic mural of a man riding a horse painted on a brick wall -- known as the Paul Revere mural -- crumbled.

On Tuesday, local officials called it a tornado, even though the National Weather Service had yet to confirm it.

On Wednesday, weather officials did, though they were still measuring the strength of the funnel.

As the morning wore on, the whine of chain saws and generators filled the air. State troopers directed traffic on major intersections because the traffic lights are out and dangling from the wires.

Streetlight poles were torn from their bases and lay entangled with downed trees.

Many sidewalks remain impassable, blocked by fallen trees. Utility lines lie in the ground and across walkways.

The first thing Cecilia Briggs noticed Tuesday afternoon were the acoustic ceiling tiles in her ceiling shaking. Then they began falling to the floor of her living room.

“That’s when I started freaking out,” said Briggs, who lives on West Embargo Street in Rome. “I called my cousin and I’m like, the whole ceiling is going to collapse and I think it’s going to fall on me.”

It didn’t. The storm passed and Briggs emerged unscathed.

That’s when she saw the debris from the First Presbyterian Church, which sits across the parking lot from her apartment. The steeple had been sheared off, and the large sections of the roof had been ripped away by the wind, trusses open to the gray sky.

The debris from the church had knocked down the wooden fence next to Brigg’s apartment, but had left her RV and car untouched. She attributed that to divine intervention.

“I just felt that He’s telling me, ‘when you ask, you receive,’” she said.

Lonnie Young lives on the first floor of a two-story home on George Street, right in the path of the destruction. His daughter, 32, and two grandchildren, six and four, live on the top floor.

On Tuesday afternoon, he was walking his dog in front of his house. He said a metal rod flew right past his head and pierced a tree just a foot or two away from where he was standing. The wind ripped off his roof and blew out his windows.

“It was crazy,” he said.

Once Young got back inside, he realized the collapsed roof made it impossible for his daughter and grandchildren to get out of their apartment. So, he punched a hole through the wall and pulled them into his downstairs apartment.

“I literally was punching on the wall and everything and breaking all the sheet rock,” he said. “I had to hurry up and bring the kids in through all that.”

His daughter and grandchildren were physically okay but the experience “traumatized” them. They spent the night together in the middle of the downstairs apartment without power.

This morning, Young woke and started cleaning. He said he plans to fire up the grill and cook some of the food that will likely go bad soon for the people on George Street who are helping with the cleanup.

“All of the food, it’s for the cleanup crews now,” he said. “Me and my neighbors will grill it and feed everybody because what else can we do with it?”

During Tuesday’s storm, Long sat in his truck for about 30 minutes while hail, wind and debris smashed the vehicle.

“It felt like the glass on my driver’s side was getting ready to bust,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. I was I was just at the mercy of it.”

When it was over, the former military member with emergency training got out to help. He said he began checking on people and seeing if anyone needed assistance. He said he went from danger mode to survivor mode.

He went to a nearby dialysis center, where he found a couple of women traumatized from the experience. He said, “You just survived the tornado like I did.”

Today, Long isn’t finished helping.

A day after surviving the storm, Long made his way back to Rome early Wednesday morning to help with the cleanup. He spent the morning helping remove debris from homes along George Street.

“I truly credit God for protecting me because there’s no other way around that I should not have survived being in the middle of a tornado,” he said.