UPTON – Resident Roberto Souza was in bed when the porch roof from the other side of the house at 142 Main St. came crashing into his bedroom wall by an EF-1 tornado.
“Thursday morning they come and take the dumpster, so we thought it was that,” Souza said. “But I said, ‘no, it’s much more than that.’ … I don’t know if it was a tornado, but it was very powerful. I’ve only seen this when I was in the Sanibel Island after Katrina in 2005. It’s like an apocalypse scene.”
Souza was one of many residents who were woken in the middle of the night to what some described as the sound of a train in their backyards as an intense storm plowed through the Main Street area.
Just before 4 p.m. Thursday the National Weather Service confirmed that two EF-1 tornadoes touched down in Worcester County. The one in Upton tracked 1 mile with a maximum width of 100 yards. The second, which is the one that hit first, tracked 4.4 miles with a maximum width of 200 yards.
In addition to tearing the porch roof off of the Main Street home, the storm forced officials to shut down Rte. 140 at Main Street for an hour. The storm also temporarily displaced 10 residents because of damage to their home, according to a Tweet put out by the Upton Police Department.
As of 1 p.m., The National Weather Service had yet to assess the damage to determine what type of storm passed through. It’s speculated that the damage was either caused by a mirco-burst — straight-line wind — a damaging burst of high powered wind, or by a small tornado.
With countless downed trees also scattered around Nathaniel Way and surrounding streets, residents and town workers are spending their Thursday cleaning up the covering of green leaves on the street with push brooms and leaf blowers. Some residents even took the woods searching for their missing window screens.
Nathaniel Street resident Dena Connors woke up this morning to find a large tree branch protruding from her husband’s back windshield, paired with multiple downed trees, and a snapped basketball hoop.
Walking her dog down the branch-strewn street, she described the ruckus the night before.
“No one got hurt, which is most important,” she said. “It was the weirdest thing. It came so quick and went so fast. … My dog woke me up, and I heard it coming. I thought, ‘this is either a lot of rain or a really lot of wind that’s coming.’”
The storm rolled through Massachusetts between 1:30 and 2:30 a.m. Thursday causing power outages throughout central and eastern Massachusetts. As of 7:30 a.m., National Grid was reporting 598 customers out of power in Upton. Power has since been restored. The electrical company reported the first outages started about 2:47 a.m.
Upton is not the only community suffering from storms on Thursday; customers lost power in Marlborough, Southborough, Sutton and Douglas.