WASHINGTON聽鈥� A day after hail and heavy rain pummeled the area, residents are cleaning up debris, estimating the damage to houses, cars and businesses, and in thousands of聽cases waiting for the power to come back on.
The Middleburg, Virginia area in Loudoun County was among the hardest-hit areas, with houses and聽cars damaged by golf-ball sized hail. At one point there were so many tree leaves, limbs and branches down on the roads that you couldn’t聽see the pavement, 小萝莉影视’s Nick Iannelli reports.
Lisa Johnson was working at a Middleburg gas station when the storm hit, and says that she and others聽thought the hail would come through the roof. “In 47 years I’ve never seen a hailstorm that bad,” she said. “It did quite a bit of damage to this little town. I’ve never seen this before, and [I] hope to God I never do again.”
Zan Dial said he was working in his restaurant when “All hell broke loose. Next thing I know, there’s glass flying everywhere, water damage everywhere.” The only thing he could do, he said, was “make sure everybody’s safe.”
At the worst, about 32,000 customers in the D.C. area were without power. On Friday morning, crews are still working to counter the damage of the storm, but thousands are still without electricity (all numbers as of 4:30聽p.m.聽Friday):
Dominion聽Virginia Power is reporting 1,354 outages in northern Virginia; the majority of them were in聽Fauquier County, where there were 511 outages.
The Rappahannock Electric Cooperative is reporting that roughly 1,600聽customers are without power.
Potomac Edison is reporting about fewer than 40聽outages in Maryland — 27 of which are聽in Washington County and about 10 were in Montgomery and Frederick counties; and nine聽outages were reported in the West Virginia panhandle.
Damage and outages聽are even more severe in the Richmond area:聽More than 135,000聽Dominion Virginia customers聽are without power in central Virginia, including about 21,000聽in Richmond.
The power outages and storm聽damage聽is so severe that public schools were聽closed in Richmond, Henrico and New Kent counties.
If you need the phone number for your power company, text the word 鈥淧OWER鈥� to 91035 and 小萝莉影视 will text the number back to you.
小萝莉影视’s Tiffany Arnold and Nick Iannelli contributed to this report.
