ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) -- A lightning flash exploded a natural gas line, setting a house trailer on fire, and thousands of homes had no power early Monday after thunderstorms laid a trail of damage across upstate New York.
Ed Neal and his daughter were out of their porch Sunday night in Pembroke, a rural town midway between Rochester and Buffalo, when lightning hit a U.S. Gypsum gas line running through an adjoining field where they keep a trailer.
``It sounded like a bomb,'' Neal said in Monday's Daily News of Batavia. ``We looked around and she started screaming `The trailer's on fire!'''
Volunteer firefighters blocked off a road until the gas line could be shut off about 90 minutes later. The explosion left a crater in the ground, Neal said.
Stormy weekend weather that created havoc across the Midwest moved east into New York Sunday night, and clusters of thunderstorms rolled through parts of New York, Pennsylvania and the New England states into Monday.
The storm produced wind gusts above 60 miles an hour, flooded houses along Lake Ontario in the Rochester region and felled trees and power lines, causing scattered power outages and flood warnings from western to New York to the Albany region.
Some 32,000 customers of Niagara Mohawk lost power at some point overnight Sunday, most of them in the Mohawk Valley around Rome and Camden, and the remainder in and around Syracuse, said utility spokeswoman Kerry Burns.
By Monday morning, about 18,000 customers still had no electricity - 14,000 of them in the Mohawk Valley, Burns said.
In the Rochester region, power was knocked out to about 6,700 customers, closing at least one school in the suburb of Greece. By midday Monday, however, power had been restored to all but a few hundred homes, said Rochester Gas & Electric spokesman Dick Marion.
