Leslie Bennett, a city of Canandaigua resident who owns a catamaran that had been knocked off its trailer, couldn’t believe her eyes as she looked at the wreckage from West Lake Road.
“The carnage just makes you feel sick to your stomach. It’s amazing that it can just hit one place like that,” she said.
The storm, which National Weather Service meteorologists are classifying as an F-1 tornado, damaged the club’s front lawn and many of the boats in the marina. The scale rates tornadoes from 0 to 5.
“This is really something down here. What’s really weird about this is how localized it is. Downtown Canandaigua is fine, and most of West Lake Road is fine, too. It’s just the yacht club that’s hit,” said Rob Turbett, a fleet captain at the club.
The storm sank two boats in the marina.
“That just doesn’t happen. It’s just bizarre,” Turbett said.
The storm hit the marina just before 1 p.m. on Saturday. Its path was just a half-mile long, said Canandaigua Fire Chief Matthew Snyder, and about 50 yards wide. He estimated the storm damaged about half a dozen homes, and it did extensive damage to boats at the marina. No occupied boats were affected, he said, and no one was injured.
Members of the club’s board of directors met Saturday evening to decide what would happen next.
Dick Raymond, husband of Sue Raymond, chair of the club’s board of governors, said there would definitely be no sailing Sunday, and he didn’t know when members would be allowed to take their boats on the water.
“Welcome to heartbreak hill,” Raymond said to another club member Saturday. The Raymonds live on West Lake Road just south of the club.
“There’s trees in my lawn, and we didn’t have any trees in the yard before today,” he said.
Raymond also said the board was meeting to discuss its insurance situation. The club, which has about 100 boats and a few hundred members, requires each of its members to have insurance on their boats. In addition, the club has insurance on the property.
Another club member, Kieran Draper of Pittsford, said he’d never seen anything like what happened Saturday.
“The damage is a lot worse than you can imagine. The boats are completely smashed,” he said.
Shark Park, a nickname for the portion of the marina that holds the club’s Shark Catamaran fleet, was heavily damaged.
“(The boats in Shark Park) weigh about 450 pounds, and they’ve just been tossed and tumbled,” Turbett said.
The damage to the club headquarters was minimal, he said, as only a few windows were blown out.
Most of the boats on the south side of the club weren’t damaged, but the ones in the middle and northern portion “are just tumbled and trashed,” added Turbett.
Paul Driscoll, the Rochester Gas & Electric line supervisor in charge of the crews on scene, said only a couple of homes lost power. RG&E planned to restore power to those homes at some point Saturday night.
Winds were so strong, Driscoll said, that they snapped a telephone pole in half.
Snyder said the storm came on so suddenly, there wasn’t even an advisory from the National Weather Service in effect.
“There was absolutely nothing indicating the classical signs of a tornado,” he said. There wasn’t even lightning or thunder. It was, he said, “a quiet, fast-moving storm with a tornado in the middle of it.”
from MPNnow.com
