Workers are out today cleaning up and repairing the roof at Main Street Apartments in Potsdam, which was heavily damaged in the microburst that hit Tuesday.

POTSDAM – The storm that hit Potsdam yesterday evening generated a microburst and packed gusts of nearly 60 mph, a National Weather Service meteorologist confirms.

The storm dropped about three-quarters of an inch of rain between 5:55 and 6:10 p.m., according to Marlon Verasany, hydrometerological technician at the NWS office in Burlington.

The high winds caused trees to fall, power outages, a couple of roofs to be heavily damaged, and a airplane at the airport to slip a tiedown and become damaged.

A microburst is “a small column of intense air sinks and creates a quick rush to the ground. It comes straight down and spreads out rapidly” in high winds once it reaches the surface, Verasany said. “It’s usually accompanied by heavy precipitation,” which this event was, he said.

In roughly that same time period, winds picked up from 14 mph at 5:50 to 35 mph with gusts of 40 mph at 5:55, 39 mph winds with 57 mph gusts at 6 p.m., and still had 57 mph gusts at 6:05 but base winds had dropped to 15 mph, according to readings at Potsdam Municipal Airport, Damon Field. By 6:10, the rain and wind had begun to taper off, but gusts as high as 27 mph persisted.

The top of this thunderstorm was at about 50,000 feet, Verasany said, while a typical North Country thunderstorm’s clouds usually top out at 30,000 to 40,000 feet.

“50,000 is definitely the higher end here,” he said.

Several thousand electric customers were without power for a time Tuesday night, and trouble continued with briefer outages later.