By Jeff Stapleton
First there was lots of rain and then came the winds. Windy conditions on Friday coupled with moist ground from the rain led to many trees falling down during the early part of the day on Friday in Caroline County, which brought down power lines and closed roads. The latter part of the day on Friday brought brush fires as the ground quickly dried up throughout the day.
Friday was also a day off for Caroline County Public School students. Initially, early Friday morning, schools were on a 2 hour delay. That changed to closed as the winds started whipping up Friday morning.
Caroline County Fire-EMS Chief Jason Loftus says that between the early morning hours of Thursday to the early morning hours of Sunday, Fire-EMS responded to 141 calls. 104 of those were fire calls and 37 were EMS calls. “We had 17 woodland fires or brush fires that burned an estimated 318 acres.” There was no personal property damage reported during the brush fires.
During that period, there were also 2 working house fires that resulted in total losses for the houses. One fire occurred at 3307 Goose Hill Road in Ruther Glen. The other occurred at 16082 First Street in Milford.
“Everybody in the county was extremely busy,” Loftus said. “Every station responded. It was a very short and intense duration for activity.” In addition to the fire and EMS calls, Loftus said that they also responded with the Caroline County Sheriff’s Office for numerous trees that were down due to winds. Loftus did not estimate how many calls involved tree removal.
In Caroline County, Rappahannock Electric Cooperative reported outages in the thousands on Friday on their website. By Monday morning, that number was down to only 12 and there was a notice on their website that any remaining customers without electricity should have their power back by the end of the day Monday.
According to Rappahannock Electric Cooperative’s website, they got help from line workers from across Virginia and three other states to help restore power. In the Cooperative’s 22 county territory, 50,000 customers lost power. That number hovered between 3,000 and 4.000 for Caroline customers through much of the day Friday. Most of the damage in the REC territory happened west of here toward Charlottesville.
Why did we have such strong winds? It was all part of a coastal storm that formed off shore in the Mid-Atlantic according to Wayne Albright, meteorologist with the National Weather Service forecast office in Wakefield. This was coupled with a cold front that came into the area on Thursday night. “With cold air coming in with the storm offshore, we had gusty winds,” he said. “The rain we had Thursday night accompanied the cold front and kicked off the storm offshore.”
Albright said the storm that formed offshore is not a regular Nor’Easter that starts down south and lashes everyone up the coast with rain. “It is basically a Nor’Easter but not your classic Nor’Easter,” Albright said. “It basically formed off the Mid-Atlantic and then moved north.”
There were recorded gusts of 55 miles an hour at Fort A.P. Hill as well as 40 mile an hour gusts in Port Royal recorded Friday, according to Albright. In addition, there was a gust of 63 miles an hour that was clocked in Spotsylvania County near Fredericksburg. Hanover also had a gust of 55 miles an hour on Friday. The highest gusts recorded on Saturday in Caroline County typically were between 35 and 40 miles an hour, Albright said.
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