Ontario County EM: Cleanup moving along in Canandaigua, looking ahead to future events

CANANDAIGUA, N.Y. (WROC) — Cleanup is ongoing from this week’s resurgence of severe weather across Western New York. One of the hardest hit areas was in Canandaigua where an EF-0 tornado was confirmed to have touched down on Monday, July 15.

The tornado had estimated winds of 75 mph and tracked along the northern end of Eastern Boulevard snapping power poles along the boulevard before dissipating. A separate straight-line wind event occurred almost directly after the tornado dissipated with winds estimated to have peaked at 95 mph along the north end of Canandaigua Lake through Kershaw Park and the Canandaigua Country Club.

In a conversation with the Ontario County Director of Emergency Management John Yannotti today, he said that this past week yielded a lot more damage than the week before across the county with most reports being focused in and around Canandaigua.

“Currently the park has been cleaned up. The residents are cleaning up after the storm and NYSEG or RG&E is still putting new poles out currently along Eastern Boulevard. Otherwise, throughout the county, we’ve had very few reports of any other major damage,” said Yannotti.

Yannotti is new to this particular role, taking over around 7 months ago in December 2023. With two weeks of severe weather in a row, his department has been put to work and they’ve been using this as a learning opportunity as they’re gearing up to update their plans in the coming months.

“The plan going forward is we are going to be updating our plans and all of the lessons learned to include areas for improvement as well as even the strengths that the county has. All those things will be incorporated into the updated plans,” said Yannotti.

While in this particular instance, the lessons learned are primarily for weather-related events, that’s just one of the many different plans that exist, and are set to be updated.

“There’s a lot to look at when it comes to the plans. You know, there’s not just weather plans, there’s all kinds of plans could be cyber. It could be anything,” said Yannotti.

As for the next steps on this event, the plan is to clean up and restore power to those who are still without, which RG&E did say in a recent update should be by Thursday afternoon.

“I would imagine the state is looking into the damage that occurred and figuring out maybe a total value across the county as to how much damage may have occurred, which could possibly trigger state aid. But at this point, I don’t know,” said Yannotti.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to RochesterFirst.