Upstate New York Residents Divided on Disaster Preparedness in Tornadoes’ Aftermath

A view of a damaged building in the aftermath of a storm in Rome, New York, U.S., July 16, 2024 in this still image obtained from social media video. @_angels_brows via Instagram/via REUTERS

As Upstate New York area residents struggle to contain the damage from the four tornadoes that struck their counties earlier this week, provoking Gov. Hochul to declare a statewide state of emergency and deploy the National Guard, citizens in the path of the storms have voiced a range of reactions. Some praised the governor’s response, while others pointed out distinct limitations in the state’s emergency response infrastructure.

Tuesday’s severe storms that continued into Wednesday ravaged Oneida, Hamilton, and Warren Counties, west and north of Albany. They left one person dead in the village of Canastota and more than 325,000 residents in the region with limited electricity or no power at all.

In addition to calling a state of emergency and deploying soldiers and police, Ms. Hochul instructed the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) to activate the State Emergency Operations Center.

The DHSES took numerous actions, including deploying special response teams using drones to gauge the extent of the damage and coordinate actions, sending a State Incident Management Team into the field, putting canine search-and-rescue teams to work, and making portable internet and radios available through the Office of Interoperable and Emergency Communications.

The governor herself paid a visit to one of the hardest-hit places, Rome, a town of approximately 32,000 residents in Oneida County, where the winds tore off roofs and knocked down power lines and trees, blocking roads and causing severe damage to businesses and residences throughout the municipality.

The winds pummeling Rome and the surrounding area were so powerful they displaced a B-52 bomber from its position on the ground at Griffiss Air Force Base.

“You cannot imagine the impact of seeing from the sky how vast the destruction is. When you see entire swaths of trees just collapsed like they were toothpicks,” Ms. Hochul said in a statement.

“If you want to know the power of this tornado, take note of the fact that a B-52 bomber was flipped on its side that weighs 183,000 pounds.”

A Coordinated Response

For residents of the area, the onset of the storm came swiftly and with little warning.

Angela Topi, a Verizon technician who lives in Rome’s second ward, a few miles outside the city’s downtown, recalled the moment she and her husband received an alarm over their phones.

“My husband and I saw the rains starting to come in a sideways direction. We immediately grabbed our dogs and ran down to the basement. We lost power at approximately 3:19 p.m.,” Ms. Topi told The Epoch Times.

Ms. Topi said the tornado came just as a local hospital was planning to discharge her mother from care. Emerging from the basement, she traveled to the hospital, but with so many trees blocking the roads, a trip that usually takes about 10 minutes took four times as long, she said.

Ms. Topi and her husband called friends and other relatives to find out if they were all right.

“Obviously, the power was out everywhere in the path of the hurricane. My mother and sister still had power, but we started hearing about homes that were completely destroyed and started seeing things on social media that we had never seen before. I was born and raised here, and in my 61 years, I’ve never seen devastation of this magnitude,” Ms. Topi said.

Given the swiftness and severity of the devastation, Ms. Topi credits the New York governor, the relatively new administration of Rome Mayor Jeffrey Lanigan, who took office in January, and the state and local police and emergency responses for taking quick and effective action.

Working nearly around the clock, the Department of Public Works cleared roads and restored power for some residents, Ms. Topi said. She praised the rapid conversion of a hangar on the 3,900-acre Griffiss Air Force Base into a relief center where the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and rescue workers could conduct operations.

But Ms. Topi qualified her praise of the response with the caveat that the base is two miles from Rome’s downtown, and with public transportation not running regularly and roads blocked, some residents found it hard, if not impossible, to avail themselves of these relief efforts.

“I don’t want to be a Monday morning quarterback and say that there were lapses in judgment. But for people who have been displaced, the difficulty is in trying to get to the base. I believe that there were shuttles the first day, but I’m hearing that a lot of people don’t want to leave their homes with no power for fear of looting and other dangers,” she said.

The New York State Assembly Chamber is seen during a legislative session after Gov. Kathy Hochul presented her 2025 executive state budget at the state Capitol in Albany, N.Y., on Jan. 16, 2024. Hans Pennink/AP Photo

Limited Storm Warning Infrastructure 

For all the scale and speed of the state authorities’ response to the tornadoes, the emergency preparedness of Oneida and nearby counties is not quite on par with other regions of the country where disasters of this nature occur.

That’s the view of Mike Brown, a Rome resident and small business owner who ran for mayor in 2015 as a candidate of the Working Families Party.

Mr. Brown recalled the chaotic moments when the tornado struck Rome on Tuesday.

“I was in my dining room, on the phone, when a 16-by-14 foot piece of metal roofing from a block away slammed into the upstairs floor and took out a 130-year-old stained-glass window and threw the pulverized glass all over the stairs,” he said.

“I grabbed my dogs, ran into the basement, and heard grinding and tearing outside. I’ve been through several tornadoes in my life, and I could hear the swirl of wind above us. I live directly across from a large city park here in town that was devastated by the tornado. We lost probably two-thirds of the trees in the park,” Mr. Brown added.

Mr. Brown said he used to live in Port Clinton, Ohio—known in that part of the state as “Tornado Alley”—before moving to Boston specifically to escape tornadoes and then finally settling down in Rome.

Having experienced such extreme weather earlier in life, he said the contrast between the infrastructure in place in Ohio and the emergency response system in New York State was clear to him. The former relies heavily on sending notifications via cellular phones, even though not all residents may own such devices.

“I don’t think the same resources are here to handle this type of weather phenomenon as in the Midwest. In Port Clinton, we had a nuclear power plant just outside of town. We had advance warning sirens for either a nuclear problem or a tornado,” he stated.

Any sighting of a tornado or detection through meteorological patterns that one was imminent would activate sirens so loud that it was possible to hear them from 10 miles away, Mr. Brown recalled. The sirens provided sufficient advance notice that it was possible to take shelter before the storm struck, he said.

By contrast, in this week’s natural disaster in Oneida County, the only warning came through residents’ phones as the storms were already making impact, said Mr. Brown.

“We really, really need to have some sort of early warning system in place to protect people further. We need to set resources aside for these things. Here in downtown Rome, we had a three-story building that collapsed and crushed several cars. If there had been people inside, they would not have survived.”

The governor’s office did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.