STAFFORD COUNTY — Trees lay on top of houses in southern Stafford County.
Fierce winds ripped through the Leeland Road section of the county, just outside Fredericksburg about 5:30 p.m. A thunderstorm packing high winds, heavy rains, and hail pummeled residents who live in neighborhoods around Grafton Village Elementary School.
Across from the school, large maple trees, some of which date back to the time of the Civil War, neighbors said, toppled because of the winds. Treetops laid on a house across the street from Grafton Village Elementary School, while massive root balls at the base of the trees exposed in the yards.
“I’ve seen tremendous damage… damage that I would have never thought I’d see here,” said Robert Lancaster, a homeowner on Decon Road for 48 years.
No injuries were reported, and power to the area was knocked out. Streetlights were dark, roads gridlocked with drivers trying to get home and emergency crews with sirens blaring called for report after report of another tree on top of a home.
“The wind picked up, I saw the rain going sideways I looked out the front door I couldn’t see the green of the trees across from my house, all I could see was gray and I knew it was rain. So I grabbed my wife and we ran into my daughter’s closet and I said: ‘we have to get out of harm’s way.’ I just had a feeling like a tornado or something was going to happen,” said Micheal Davis, who was with his wife at their Deacon Road home when the storm blew through.
When the storm passed, Davis found nine large trees down in his yard.
A spokesman for the National Weather Service in Sterling says they were not aware of the damage in the Deacon Road area of Stafford County until Potomac Local tipped them off about it.
There is radar evidence of straight-line winds affecting a wide swath of Virginia on Sunday afternoon from Culpeper to Fredericksburg, however, a tornado has not been ruled out, he added. Investigators from the weather service could head to the Fredericksburg region as soon as Monday.
The rain was also an issue with the storm, as more than two and a half inches of rain was reported at Stafford Regional Airport on Sunday.
So much rain fell a drainage ditch at the intersection of Brooke Road and John Roberts Lane failed, prompting the closure of Brooke Road. Now crews at the Virginia Department of Transportation must repair it, and that’s on top of other weather-related road failures in Stafford this summer to include a sinkhole in North Stafford that formed late last month, and a slope failure on Bells Hill Road in June.
