Lines for gas were long at the local service station – residents like 72-year-old Wayne Kennedy cuing to keep cars, trucks and generators going after a winter storm dumped up to eight inches of snow on rural roads and the trees that line them.
“I’ve been here since 1993, and I’ve never seen it this bad," he recalled. "Between the heavy, wet snow and the wind, the trees couldn’t handle it.”
At the local emergency dispatch center, fire chief Robert Dube worked with about two dozen first responders and volunteers. They got so many calls that triage was the order of the night.
“Trees down, cars in a ditch, people without power — we didn’t run. It was too dangerous," he explains. "If they were injured in a wreck we ran. If they were having a major medical issue we tried to get there or if their house was on fire obviously, but other than that we didn’t run.”
Once the stormed had passed, that changed. Standing outside the county building, snow and ice slid from the roof as Sheriff Donnie Lowe recalled the storm that took this community by surprise.
"When you’re in the 60’s a couple of days before this and then you get this to come along, it took everybody off guard," he says. "We’re in a rural county, so people -- when the power goes out that’s everything. That’s their heat, running water.”
Tuesday night, the county opened a warming shelter at the local middle school complete with cots and blankets, but Lowe and Dube worried about how to get people there, and what to do if any tested positive for COVID.
On Tuesday morning we reported that State Route 522 was closed following a crash involving three semi-tractor trailers, and thousands of homes were still without power after an extraordinary number of trees fell during Monday’s storm. The situation forced a shutdown of I-64 Monday night, and VDOT feared icy conditions at dusk on Tuesday.
Crews will keep working through the night, but even now many homes and businesses in Louisa County are without power. Ninety-seven per cent went dark during yesterday’s storm, and Virginia Department of Transportation struggled to keep roads open as trees – sometimes tangled with power lines – fell across secondary roads and major highways.
“There was about a 50-mile stretch of Interstate 64 from the east end of Charlottesville all the way through Goochland County to the western suburbs of Richmond that was closed intermittently because there were hundreds of trees down – some of which had power lines tangled in them.”
VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter says crews worked their way west from Richmond, east from Charlottesville, and eventually the road was cleared.
“We were able, for the most part, to keep one lane open. It was closed intermittently, because as the crews were working, trees kept coming down. It was very unusual to have an interstate closed like that.”
