A furious storm pounded Mercer County Saturday, leaving thousands of residents without power and fallen trees and wires and debris in its wake.

Randy Coleman, area manager for Pennsylvania Power Co., estimated 5,500 customers were without power as of midnight, the result of trees falling on some lines and wind ripping down others.

The first outages began shortly after 6 p.m., when sheets of rain and high wind reached the western part of the county.

The winds remained after the heavy rains passed early in the evening. Over the next several hours, temperatures plummeted about 40 degrees and the rain turned to snow. There was a high wind advisory through midnight calling for gusts up to 60 miles per hour.

"We expect that at least some customers will be without power for another 24 hours," Coleman said, explaining that could be until early Monday.

"That would make it a 30-hour storm," Coleman added.

Emergency crews deluged with calls countywide

Emergency personnel chased problems all night and into early hours today.

"It has been off the hook, crazy," a supervisor for Mercer County 911 said at about 11 p.m. Saturday.

Hundreds of calls from across the county poured into the center after the storm hit, the supervisor said. Luckily, she said, there were no serious injuries reported.

Sharon firefighters were dispatched on about a dozen calls in 2 1/2 hours, Chief Art Scarmack said. The worst was to a home in the 300 block of East Silver Street, where a tree had crashed through the roof and into a spare room, Scarmack said. Firefighters could not remove the tree.

Sally Surma said she and her family were watching television in the living room when "a half-dead tree on my neighbors' property crashed into the house."

"It sounded like a tornado hit," she said. "There's a nice hole."

Hermitage firefighters also were swamped, a department spokesman said at about 8 p.m. "We're dealing with about 50 things right now," he said.

Greenville firefighters responded to about four calls of fallen trees and several regarding downed wires, Chief Steve Thompson said. None of the calls was life-threatening, he said.

When asked to summarize the worst problems state police had to deal with, a spokeswoman said, "Well, first of all, we've had no power for 2 1/2 hours."

"We've got four prisoners in the dark," she said.

The spokeswoman said police spent their time "running back and forth" to calls in the rural areas of the county. There were several calls of cars crashing into roadway debris and one tractor-trailer crash on Georgetown Road in Deer Creek Township, she said. None of the crashes resulted in serious injuries, she said.

Wind hampers efforts

to restore power

The miserable weather conditions complicated efforts to restore power to many residents, Coleman said. "It (the conditions) hasn't stopped the work, but it certainly has played a role," Coleman said.

High winds, for instance, made it difficult for power workers in bucket trucks to be raised 25 feet or higher from the ground.

The power outages were scattered throughout the county, Coleman said. The largest concentration was in the Shenango Valley and there also were large clusters in the Greenville and Grove City areas, he added.

With outages in all corners of the county -- such as large outages at St. Paul Homes in West Salem Township and United Community Hospital in Pine Township -- power crews had not made it to every problem area in the county by midnight, Coleman said.

In some cases, power outage is life-threatening

The power outage was "frightening" for 82-year-old Estelle Demain of New Castle Avenue in Sharon and her family.

"Her oxygen machine is going out," her daughter, Kathleen, said at 8:30 p.m.

"It's electric-powered. We had to switch to portable tanks," she said, adding that supplies were low.

"I am trying to keep her calm," she said, adding that her mother is confined to her bed.

At that time, she said she was waiting for someone to deliver more tanks.

About two hours later, Mrs. Demain's grandson, Chris, said the supplies had arrived. The person who delivered the tanks had to drive from his New Castle home to his Mercer office shortly after the storm hit to pick up supplies and then make similar stops on his way to Mrs. Demain's home. "We had less than two hours of oxygen left when he arrived," he said.