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High wind gusts blew through Rockbridge County and much of Virginia Friday evening, with strong gusts taking down trees and damaging buildings in Lexington and throughout the county.
Lexington Deputy Fire Chief Trent Roberts told The News-Gazette that the fire department was “extremely busy,” responding to 18 calls for service throughout the two hour storm, nine of which came in the first seven minutes. Additionally, the fire department also responded to seven incidents that were not reported to the emergency dispatch, for a total of 25 incidents throughout the storm. Roberts said approximately 15 trees fell in Lexington, taking down power lines and damaging structures. One house on Lime Kiln Road suf- fered, by Roberts estimate, 80 percent damage, while houses on Marshall Street and Estill Street were also damaged by falling trees, but less significantly. High wind bursts blew part of the roof off of the Randolph Street Methodist Church. Despite the extensive damage, no injuries were reported throughout the city during the storm.
Some areas of the county had similar wind bursts. Rockbridge County Deputy Fire Chief Kevin Moore responded to a call on Longhollow Road where several trees were downed by high winds and the roof blew off of a barn. He also noted that a number of trees fell across roads in the Timber Ridge Area.
“We had a lot of trees down, but they were in better spots than in Lexington,” he said.
Downed trees also resulted in power outages throughout Rockbridge County and other areas affected by the storms. BARC had nearly 1,000 customers lose power throughout their coverage area and Dominion Power posted on Facebook that 128,000 customers throughout Virginia had lost power in the storms. In Buena Vista, fire crews responded to a call for a structure fire only to find a live power line that had fallen and was arcing against a house. Crews were able to shut off power to that line before the structure caught fire.
Other areas experienced milder winds and very little damage. Julian Kesterson, a Glasgow-based weather observer for the National Weather Service, recorded maximum wind speeds of 33 miles per hour. A forecaster with the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Blacksburg, which monitors weather in southwest Virginia, as well as parts of West Virginia and North Carolina, did not have wind speeds recorded in the county or in Lexington, but said that Roanoke reported gusts of 58 miles per hour and Floyd County had gusts of 68 miles per hour.
The storm system that blew through Virginia was a squall line, which is a group of storms arranged in a line that are usually accompanied by squalls of high winds and heavy rain. The winds that accompany these storms can reach sustained speeds of 60 to 80 miles per hour.
