Pam Gensel was working in the kitchen Sunday night when she heard a loud boom and thought lightning had struck a tree outside her Northwest Akron home.

As she looked down a hallway, she saw dust and debris kick up from underneath two bedroom doors.

The high winds whipping through Northeast Ohio had toppled a giant tree that stood at least 40 feet tall in the front yard, shearing it at the roots. It smashed through the roof in the corner of the one-story, brick home on Brookshire Road, destroying two bedrooms and damaging the foundation, a bathroom and the outside air conditioning unit along the way.

The Gensel family was home at the time, but thankfully, no one was on that side of the house. Along with Pam Gensel, the family includes her husband, Tom, 23-year-old son, Jeremy, and 17-year-old son, Riley, and their three cats and a dog.

"Very lucky. Very blessed," Pam Gensel said Monday morning as she surveyed the damage. "If it would have been late at night or when we were sleeping, I don't know that Riley would have made it out."

Akron firefighters, who responded to the scene after 6 p.m., turned off the electricity and water. The Gensels can't open one of the bedroom doors — which isn't great for Riley, who can't get access to his clothes.

Some North Canton residents, meanwhile, could be without power until Wednesday, utility AEP Ohio advised.

Wind-related outages there forced North Canton City Schools to close and other city government meetings and functions to be canceled as well, The Canton Repository reported.

North Canton schools cited electric outages caused by the winds when they announced the closing. Green Local Schools also closed Monday because of outages.



Across the East

The high winds that hit Northeast Ohio howled through much of the nation's eastern half for a second day Monday, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and closing schools, The Associated Press reported.

Wind gusts of hurricane force, 74 mph, or higher were reported around the region, including West Virginia and New York.

Trees and power poles were easy targets in ground saturated by rain and snowmelt, plunging homes and businesses into darkness, though in most places power was expected back quickly as winds died down by the end of Monday. Roofs were peeled off in places.

Giant chunks of jagged ice spilled over the banks of the Niagara River across from Buffalo on Sunday.

Dramatic footage captured by park police in Ontario, Canada, showed massive ice chunks roiling onto shore.

Ice mounds 25 to 30 feet high also came ashore farther south, piling up on several lakefront properties and patios in suburban Hamburg, N.Y.

Wind advisories were in effect through Monday in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast up to northern New England.

Trail of damage

Across the region, from Wadsworth to the Portage Lakes and beyond, the winds left the ground littered with trees and branches big and small — leaving some roads and driveways blocked. The Suburbanite posted a picture of a Firestone Park home with its front porch roof and a nearby parked car smashed by a giant tree section.

Like other homeowners whose dwellings were damaged, Pam and Tom Gensel have contacted their insurance company. The Gensels, both computer programmers who have lived in their Northwest Akron house for 24 years, will stay with neighbors for the time being.

Tom Gensel described the tree crashing through the house as sounding like "a hundred picture frames being busted at the same time."

"I knew almost instantly what it was," he said. "I thought maybe a big limb had fallen through the roof."

It was dark at the time, so they weren't able to assess the full damage until firefighters showed up and illuminated the house.

Despite the damage and inconvenience, Pam Gensel has kept her sense of humor.

"I was wanting renovations anyway, but not quite like this," she said. "I wanted them kind of planned."

Rick Armon can be reached at 330-996-3569 or rarmon@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter at @armonrickABJ. The Associated Press contributed to this report.