‘Super Bowl’ of snowstorms paralyzes Rappahannock County
Rappahannock County joined its neighbors Saturday in declaring a state of emergency as a paralyzing snowstorm buried the county, closing local roads and knocking out electric power for more than 800 residents.
Buried in a white-out
The snow, which began Friday morning, continued 24 hours later and was expected to continue falling through the day Saturday. Accumulations in the area varied from 15 inches on up.
A spokeswoman in VDOT’s Warrenton office said that “all primary roads are passible but snow-covered,” including Route 211 through the county. Because the wet snow is packing even when plowed, “there is no blacktop out there,” she added. VDOT crews are concentrating on keeping primary highways open, leaving secondary roads until later. She said she could not even guess when secondary and local roads would be plowed.
County Administrator John McCarthy told RappVoice: “We have joined all of our neighboring counties in declaring a local emergency, which has no immediate effect other than to render us eligible for disaster assistance as conditions deteriorate and resources at the state and federal level are available.”
McCarthy, in an email message, said, “Most of our volunteer fire & rescue squads are minimally staffed with members bunking there and responding to calls with the assistance of Sperryville and Amissville’s plow-equipped utility trucks…. suffice it to say that getting to people with needs, particularly those on narrow secondary roads and on private drives will be increasingly difficult.”
Most customers of Rappahannock Electric Co-operative in the county have lost power. As of 9 a.m. Saturday, REC said that 845 of its 944 customers in Rappahannock County are without power.
The electric co-op said it had more than 17,000 customers without power as of early Saturday morning. ” The majority of outages are west of Interstate 95 concentrated in the counties of Culpeper, Madison, Fauquier, Louisa, Orange and Spotsylvania,” it said. In Culpeper County, more than 3,000 customers were without power.
“The Cooperative is deploying additional contract personnel to those affected counties,” its announcement said. “Although the company is making progress in restoring power to these counties, restoration efforts will take time to complete. Heavy snow has weighted down trees causing limbs to break and fall onto power lines.”
Allegheny Power, which also serves large areas of Rappahannock, said about 12% of its county customers had been affected by outages–482 customers out of a total of 3,997 served by the utility. Allegheny Power plans to turn its Virginia territory over to Rappahannock Electric Co-op this year and will no longer serve Rappahannock County after that deal is completed.
Demaris Miller, in Washington, VA, said she measured 18″ of snow Saturday morning and another three inches had fallen by early afternoon. The Miller home had power, but had experenced a surge that blew out two surge protectors. In Harris Hollow, Sylvie Rowand reported 20 inches of snow and also reported a surge that fried one fuse and she was uncertain if it also zapped her dishwasher–but she was too busy shoveling snow to find out yet.
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