by Robert Lynch; July 4, 2025; updated 2:20 PM
A firefighter whose name you’d know stood alone in the Enfield Fire Station when the National Weather Service sounded the alarm July third: “Tornado Warning for Southwest Tompkins County in central New York…. TAKE COVER NOW! Move to a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building….”
“What was I to do?” the seasoned firefighter asked herself. The fire station may be sturdy, but it has no basement. A whirlwind could quickly peel off the metal roof and leave her and everything else exposed. Then what? “Maybe I should crawl into that fire engine behind me,” she later recalled she’d asked herself. Perhaps the safest place at that moment was inside that rugged, spanking-new Truck 602?
Shelter-in-pumper never proved necessary. As best anyone knows, there never was a tornado. But there was a bad storm; the worst so far this Enfield summer. It came up from seemingly nowhere. It was gone within an hour. But when it raged it was fierce, downing trees, snapping power lines, damaging a handful of homes, and in its aftermath forcing the re-routing of busy highway traffic onto narrow country roads well into the night.
“It was pretty intense,” Enfield Volunteer Fire Company (EVFC) First Assistant Chief Kevin Morse Jr, the company’s Chief-in-Charge at the time, said of the calls that came in and the responses needed. The toughest time came in the first 90 minutes after the 2 PM storm hit, he said. Crews needed to lend support to different sides of Enfield simultaneously, Morse explained.
Enfield responded to 14 calls during that period, Fire Chief Jamie Stevens reported. Twenty-six additional calls came for storm-related emergencies in other parts of Tompkins County, Stevens indicated.
No injuries or fires occurred, the fire chief said. The EVFC responded to two instances of trees falling on houses. In one instance a fallen tree briefly trapped an elderly Applegate Road woman in her home.
Buildings may have sustained damage, yet none were apparently destroyed.
A giant locust fell upon the roof of John and Paula Meeker’s home at 576 Van Dorn Road South, causing roof damage, but not forcing the Meekers to flee.
At the southern edge of Enfield’s Christian Cemetery, the storm tore off a big maple limb. It fell into an adjacent field, causing no damage to the cemetery.
Power remained out for many into the evening. A trio of tree-related power line breaks along Mecklenburg Road (NY Route 79) near the intersection with Rothermich and Podunk Roads left that highway closed until nearly nightfall. All of Enfield Center and Miller’s Corners lost power for hours. The Dandy Mart closed. The Enfield Fire Station was forced to run on back-up generator power.
Kevin did “an outstanding job,” Chief Stevens told a television interviewer at the fire station Thursday evening as to Morse’s coordination of rescue efforts.
Enfield Board of Fire Commissioners member Robyn Wishna also took pains to commend the many Enfield residents who’d pitched in during the hours after Thursday’s storm to clear debris, direct traffic, and otherwise assist emergency crews.
“One man took his skid loader to push limbs out of the way,” Wishna reported.
The National Weather Service’s initial report, issued at 1:45 PM July third, indicated that the storm that later caused Enfield’s damage was located in Mecklenburg and was moving southwest at 40 miles-per-hour. That initial report warned of a “Tornado and half-dollar size hail.”
The weather service’s prediction of a possible tornado based its conclusion on the observation that “radar indicated rotation.”
After tearing up Enfield, the storm moved east into the Town of Ithaca. There it produced the biggest traffic snarl.
Downed trees and power lines north of the Eddydale Farms produce stand prompted the mid-afternoon closure of all Route 13 traffic between NY Route 327 and Five Mile Drive.
Emergency crews redirected the heavy, pre-holiday Route 13 traffic along a circuitous, poorly-equipped, country road detour. It employed Town-maintained Gray and Colegrove roads, the latter currently undergoing reconstruction. The detour continued until past Midnight.
Homes and businesses in the City of Ithaca by and large escaped damage equivalent to that sustained in Enfield. But inconveniences occurred, nonetheless. Power outages forced some businesses, including the Ithaca Wegmans, to operate on back-up generator power. The store cut electrical usage, leaving eerie, dimly-lit aisles for shoppers to navigate.
While Thursday’s storm proved destructive, it did not rise to the severity of the July 15th storm last year that left some customers without power for up to two days, prompted Enfield’s Supervisor to spearhead the distribution of dry ice, and spawned as many as 455 emergency calls to the Tompkins County 911 Center, reportedly its highest single-day volume of calls in a decade.
The 2024 storm also prompted the EVFC to update its emergency dispatch procedures, inadequacies that led to confusion, redundancies, and delayed responses that day. In the days and weeks that followed, Chief Stevens took the lead in correcting the deficiencies.
The magnitude of power outages from this year’s Thursday storm varied. NYSEG reported as many as 3,610 customers in the county lacked power as of 4:30 PM Thursday. The utility initially predicted power to most would be restored by 5 PM that day. It wasn’t.
As of Noon on Friday, July 4, NYSEG reported 294 Enfield-area customers still without power, the outages scattered among nine locations. The largest outage, affecting 135 customers, was along western Bostwick Road, with restoration scheduled for early Friday evening. The second largest outage, affecting 87 customers, ran along Applegate Road North near the Ulysses town line.
The same storm that walloped Enfield also produced destruction to the East, including in the Binghamton area and on to the Delaware River valley.
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