Our area was struck Friday night by a band of high intensity storms called a Derecho. There was a quick report about it on the news, but not much emphasis of it's intensity. We were cozied up in our house watching TV when a text from my brother-in-law (who watches the weather as a hobby, God love him!) came through saying "a storm with 80mph winds is coming. You've got about 30 minutes". We rushed outside to take the plants in pots off the railing and put down the umbrella.
When the storm hit it was incredible. A wall of wind slammed into the house with such intensity it could have been alive. It was truly amazing how fierce the storm sounded. The power flickered and went out and I went upstairs to make sure the kids were ok. After finding flashlights and lanterns and waiting for the storm to pass, we all settled in to sleep.
In the morning, with no power, no coffee and no hair-dryers we were a bit out of sorts. But grateful to not find any damage to our roof or siding. About 5 houses down from us a guy lost half a tree. He is still clearing it today. We can't tell from the photo if it dented the van, or if it was braced enough by the house to spare it.
This was one of the hottest weekends on record, I think at the hottest it got to 85 in the house. I found that if I sat still it was bearable. In spite of the minor discomfort I couldn't help but think how fortunate we are. There are people who have no air conditioning ever, who's only shelter is a park bench. We managed to find ice (which was no easy task this weekend), we had plenty of cold drinks, and we were forced to unplug a bit from our usual addictions and spend time with each other. All in all, it wasn't a bad weekend.
Our power stayed off from about 10:30 Friday night till 4:30 Sunday afternoon. I checked the Dominion outage feed about every 30 minutes, driving around to recharge my phone and get into some air conditioning when I needed to. At first count Saturday Morning I believe about 460K of Dominion's 832K Northern Virginia customers were without power. By this morning they were down to 162K without power. I want to thank Dominion for restoring power as quickly as they did. Our house was somewhere in the 240K range, I hope those lower in the line have power by nightfall.
After two days with no power, my husband got stir crazy and drove around Herndon, VA taking photos of the damage. Here are a few of the things he saw. Some of these trees are pretty amazing!
Do you have a Stormpocalypse or power-outage story? I'm curious to see just how many were affected by this outage.
Here's an interesting link to more photos of the damage from all over the east coast
No comments:
Post a Comment