Tornado’s destruction took just minutes. The cleanup will linger for months.
The tornado that tore a 250-yard-wide path through a
At least 20 people, including children, were displaced from their
For
By Saturday morning work crews of all types descended on the newly noisy street to stretch tarps over exposed roofs and hammer plywood over blown-out windows. The township brought in dumpsters while landscapers got to work sawing fallen trees.
With windows and roofs blown out or ripped away, homes are vulnerable to extensive water damage that can trigger mold if not quickly repaired. “It could take a month, it could take six months, it could take a year,” said Bevilacqua, who owns a
Eight homes, including Bevilacqua’s -- the ones most closely in the tornado’s path -- sustained devastating damage. Many more of the modern-day carriage houses nearby have shattered windows, uprooted trees, and missing shingles and siding.
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“The good news is everybody’s safe," Bevilacqua said. “Now it’s the challenge of each of us working through our insurance issues.” Bevilacqua is an IT project manager at Vanguard, but his experience with home contracting and membership in a homeowner association has made him something of an informal adviser.
The cleanup will be complicated, he said, because many carriage houses are twins and it’s likely the owners will have different levels of insurance, with different response times for remediation.
Damage caused by wind or tornadoes is generally covered by homeowner plans, but there could be limits. Storm-related flood damage might not be covered.
Shank’s insurance company already sealed up the home. That’s the easy part. “We do have good insurance. I haven’t met with the insurance people yet,” he said. “So now I just wait for the insurance adjuster and we start the battle.”
Bevilacqua is also learning as he goes. “What I have found out the hard way is that they don’t cover things like downed trees. They don’t pay for debris, and that’s all over the place.” Pine trees that snapped like toothpicks pierced through perhaps a half-dozen homes, he said. By Saturday morning, Bevilacqua had three trucks full of debris ready to haul away. “What they do pay for is securing the house. Plywooding the windows, sealing the roofs.”
“This morning when I got on the job site the ceiling was starting to collapse,” he said. “Now you’re fighting the insurance companies on what they’ll cover. They haven’t sent anybody out. I couldn’t wait for an adjuster. I started cleaning up what I could.”
“It was a rough night a lot of places,” said Jonathan O’Brien, a meteorologist with the
The winds that tore through the region knocked down many trees and sent Peco crews into high gear. At its peak, 130,000 customers in
On
The lengthy repairs likely mean his displaced family will be staying in Bevilacqua’s home a few miles away for quite a while.
“Now they live with me," he said. "I never knew this would be the case that they’d be moving back in with me.”
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