A storm system rolled over large portions of the tri-state area Tuesday, but in Delaware County, the damage was minimal with only minor flooding reported.
Director of Delaware County Emergency Management Alex McCarthy said Wednesday the projections and models from the National Weather Services projected over the weekend that Delaware County was in the path of the storm and showed a possibility for “significant tornado outbreak” for much of Ohio.
McCarthy said the models continued to project severe weather Monday, and the National Weather Service said it was a serious situation, which resulted in Delaware County coming up with several plans and assembling resources for a severe storm.
However, on Tuesday, the morning rain lasted longer than projected and was followed by showers in the afternoon that McCarthy said cooled the county significantly and made it harder for a tornado to form.
“(There was) a lot more rain in the morning, and it stayed cloudy a lot longer,” McCarthy said Wednesday. “As those showers came through, they really stabilized the atmosphere and made it pretty much very difficult for any storms to fire up around the evening. … Thankful things were just too cool and too stable for anything tornado-related to form. It was all around colder than expected.”
McCarthy said there were tornado warnings around Cincinnati, which caused the National Weather Service to add Delaware County to a tornado watch, but there was no tornado warning for the county.
The National Weather Service projects that Delaware and Licking County got around 5 inches of rain, McCarthy added, and there was flooding in some low-lying areas as well as ponding but “nothing too significant.”
“It was not as bad as it could have been,” he said.
McCarthy said the situation was the “complete opposite” of the storm that caused several tornadoes in the county last month.
”We were expecting the possibility for some severe weather (in March) but weren’t really expecting anything like what we actually had,” McCarthy said. “The storms that formed were impressive that day.”
McCarthy said Delaware County Emergency Management and Delaware County Amateur Radio Emergency Services were in the office during the storm but called it around 7:30 p.m. after the storm passed Columbus and was unlikely to reach the county in a severe way.
9-1-1 Director Lauren Yankanin said Wednesday there was not an uptick in 911 calls Tuesday night, and the staff that was brought in to help cover the severe weather were sent home around 7:45 p.m.
The tornado watch expired around 10 p.m.
“We’ve had a busy couple of weeks here,” McCarthy said. “The office is still hard at work with recovery aspects from that tornado (last month), but we want to encourage people that tornado season is just getting started. Now is a great time to make plans.”
McCarthy said county residents should not rely only on tornado sirens, but instead, should have a “multi-prong” notification system. He added county residents can sign up for the Delco Alert System at https://emergencycomms.co.delaware.oh.us/delco-alerts/.
Glenn Battishill can be reached at 740-413-0903.
