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Recovery efforts continued two days after the most violent storm of the year struck the Washington region, with major roads closed and thousands of customers without electricity.
On Saturday, torrential rain and winds in excess of 80 mph pummeled the District and its suburbs, downing trees that destroyed homes and cars and took out power lines. Authorities said a man in Virginia died after a tree fell on a home.
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Huge cleanup, thousands without power after storms pummel D.C. region
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Extreme rainfall fueling flash flooding
(The Washington Post)
See the places in the U.S. most at risk for extreme rainfall
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On Monday morning, all southbound lanes of the George Washington Parkway were blocked between Interstate 495 and Interstate 66, transportation officials said, and northbound lanes were open only between Route 123 and the Capital Beltway. The closures were expected to last up to four days, according to officials. Across the Potomac, Canal Road between Foxhall Road and Reservoir Road was also closed, officials said.
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More than 2,500 Pepco customers were still without power as of Monday afternoon in the District and Maryland, according to an outage map, and about 3,000 customers were without power across Virginia, according to Dominion Energy.
Ahead of a news conference Monday afternoon, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) toured Wesley Heights, an area of Northwest Washington hit hard by the storm.
The devastation was dramatic. In one of D.C.’s most expensive, heavily forested residential neighborhoods, power was out and streets were closed — blocked by storm debris or crammed with emergency vehicles that made it difficult to walk down streets crowded with million-dollar homes. Tree limbs had fallen on vehicles and houses, and downed wires lay in gutters.
Bowser said the unexpected storm, fueled by extreme heat, had caused “significant damage in a short period.” She urged D.C. residents to exercise caution amid the cleanup, checking on seniors and making use of city cooling centers if they are without air conditioning.
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“It could have been much worse,” she said at the news conference. “We know that, as a government, we have to be prepared for the effects of extreme weather.”
During her tour, Bowser added that her power had gone out the previous evening, when she was not at home. “It was nothing like this,” she said of the damage.
Pepco Region President Valencia McClure told the news conference that 70,000 of the utility’s customers lost power during the storm, including 14,000 in the District. She expected all service to be restored by 3 p.m. Tuesday and asked that customers be patient.
“There is a lot of danger,” she said. “Safety is our top priority.”
Tricia Duncan, an advisory neighborhood commissioner for Northwest’s Palisades area, said about 20 large heritage trees had come down in her area. Homeowners had contacted contractors to remove the trees, she said, but needed Pepco to declare work sites safe before the trees could be removed.
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Still, Duncan said, the response has been “really good.”
“I’m not here to complain,” she said after questioning Bowser during the news conference. “Though I’ve heard some complaints.”
Saturday’s storm struck after a brutal week-long heat wave that pushed temperatures into the upper 90s. The heat combined with a cold front and an upper-atmosphere disturbance to create downbursts — blasts of wind, originating in clouds, that slam into the ground and fan out, producing gusts more severe than low-end tornadoes.
Here’s what caused Saturday’s destructive storms in the D.C. area
“This is something we really haven’t seen since the derecho in 2012,” Christopher Rodriguez, director of D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, said at the news conference. “There was a lot of wind, and a lot of rain hit the ground very fast.”
As bad as the storm was in the District, there were no fatalities, Rodriguez said, and two people suffered minor injuries.
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Virginia was not so lucky. In a statement Monday, Prince William County police said they responded to the 15300 block of Holly Hill Drive in Dumfries on Saturday to investigate a death after a tree fell on a home. They found Kenneth Allan Lee Jr., 44, dead at the scene, the statement said. A police spokesman said his death was believed to be storm-related.
Peggy Fox, a spokeswoman for Dominion Energy, said in a telephone interview Monday afternoon that Arlington was the hardest-hit area of Northern Virginia, where more than 800 customers were without power. Still, the utility expected all customers’ power to be restored by 11 p.m. Monday, she said.
“I think we’re doing pretty well,” she said. “It was a tremendous amount of work that we started with.”
Derek Hamner, who moved to Wesley Heights about seven years ago, strolled through the neighborhood ahead of the mayor’s news conference. Hamner was satisfied with the city’s storm response but thought more could be done to protect homes, such as burying power lines and cutting down unsafe trees.
He said a bit of preparation could prevent catastrophe: “We don’t need to have a fire drill every time there’s a storm.”
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