A dangerous line of storms caused damaging winds along a path of hundreds of miles on April 29, causing widespread damage.
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00:00A deadly deratio moved through parts of the Ohio Valley and through the Northeast.
00:05This is an event that did lead to one life lost in the Pittsburgh area after power lines came down.
00:11There was an electrocution associated with this.
00:14Again, deratios are when we have hundreds of miles.
00:17We've had hundreds of miles, over 400 miles of wind damage,
00:21and a continuous path here across parts of the Ohio Valley and through much of the Northeast.
00:26It's just a nasty event here from Tuesday.
00:29So what is a deratio?
00:30Here we're looking at widespread, long-lived windstorms associated with fast-moving showers and thunderstorms,
00:36straight-line wind events.
00:37Occasional tornado threats can spin up within these,
00:39but it's predominantly a straight-line wind event of at least 58 miles per hour.
00:43Some instances with far greater winds, we'll talk about that in a few seconds,
00:47are going at least 400 miles without much of any breaks in that 400-plus mile path.
00:52This exceeded that.
00:53Width was at least 60 miles from one side to the other.
00:55Pittsburgh, by the way, had its third-greatest wind gust on record at Pittsburgh International Airport.
01:0171-mile-per-hour gust in the middle of this deratio in the Pittsburgh area here,
01:06and that was kind of near the midpoint.
01:08If we look at deratio occurrence, there are areas that average more than one deratio a year.
01:13You get four every three years on average here in areas around Joplin and into Bartlesville, Oklahoma,
01:18and east of there into Fayetteville, Arkansas.
01:21Some areas get one every year here, about one every year in these areas in the deeper purple.
01:28And then you get about one every two years where some of this expanded east into central Pennsylvania,
01:32and then one every four years, about 25 percent of years, have a deratio here in, say, the eastern Carolina.
01:39So this is a very rare event.
01:41And we're getting into deratio season, April, May, June, and July.