Hurricane Barry Remnants Bring Damaging Winds, Flooding Rain
BOSTON (CBS) - Severe thunderstorms moved through Massachusetts Wednesday afternoon, bringing damaging winds and flooding rains.
The remnants of Barry were nothing like the storm that walloped the Gulf Coast, but it did cause trouble.
It blasted through Holliston, snapping and uprooting trees which struck only a glancing blow to a house on Ashland Street. The National Weather Service says the damage was caused by straight line thunderstorm winds.
"All of a sudden the wind came up really hard, really bad, couldn't see nothing," said Mark Rossini, of Holliston.
Not far away on Cedar Street, neighbors say a lightning bolt did the dirty work, dumping a tree on some power lines.
The rains that came along with it were torrential in spots. On Quincy Shore Drive and the Southeast Expressway, flooding made some drivers feel like the evening commute was a boat ride.
In Waltham, firefighters were summoned to an attic fire, when lightning ripped into the roof of an apartment building.
"You keep hoping it's not smoke, but it's smoke," said Barbara Gortych, who lives in the building. "I love lightning storms but this was really a bad one. You could really tell that you should just hunker down and turn everything off and wait for it to pass."
The storm did pass, leaving behind scattered power outages.
"I'm 64 years old and I've never seen anything like that," Rossini said.