Wild winter weather strikes Fluvanna

By Heather Michon
Correspondent

Wild winter weather hit Fluvanna last week, bringing rounds of snow, heavy rain, and damaging winds from the start of the week all the way into Sunday night.

Tuesday (Feb. 11) brought about six inches of wet, heavy snow, along with some sleet and freezing rain.

“Our citizens did a great job heeding the warnings that were sent out ahead of this storm,” said Fluvanna County Sheriff’s Office Major Aaron Hurd.

There were, however, still a number of minor crashes and disabled vehicles to keep first responders busy.

“The deputies did outstanding work in rough conditions to make sure calls were answered promptly and the roads stayed open,” said Hurd.

County 911 services were disrupted Wednesday from around 9 am to 4 pm, forcing Emergency Services to use alternate lines for calls throughout the day. 

Herd said it was not clear if the outage was storm-related but said that the provider, Brightspeed, was having issues across several counties. 

Heavy rains moved in on Saturday afternoon and continued into Sunday morning. A rain gauge near Lake Monticello recorded 1.66 inches of precipitation in that 24-hour period. 

Rain and melting snow pushed up river levels on both the Rivanna and James rivers, sparking area flood warnings. 

“All of the usual roads around Kents Store that flood are flooded right now and signage is going up,” the Kents Store Volunteer Fire Department warned on Sunday afternoon.

At Scottsville, the James was expected to crest at about a foot above flood stage late Sunday night. 

As soon as the rain moved out, the high winds moved in. 

Sustained winds of over 20 mph along with gusts of 30-40 mph lasted for several hours.

By around 3 pm on Sunday, residents were reporting trees down across most of the major roads around Lake Monticello. Rt. 53 between the Lake and Charlottesville was impassible for a period of time until it could be cleared. 

“I suggest we all stay in unless it’s an emergency,” Supervisor Chris Fairchild posted on Facebook.  

Both Dominion and CVEC saw thousands of outages, with CVEC reporting on Sunday afternoon that four of their substations had lost connection with the main transmission lines.

As the wind died down late Sunday, the number of outages began to fall, but CVEC warned that the 7,000 customers still without power would likely be in the dark until sometime on Monday.

“We know there is severe damage to the system,” the company said on Facebook around 8 p.m., “but we won’t know the full extent until daylight when our teams can scout and clear the trees and destruction to make way for power restoration.”