Winds Topple Tents on the Mall, Trapping Several People
By Paul Schwartzman and Martin Weil
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Wind, rain and fist-size chunks of hail pounded the Washington region yesterday as severe thunderstorms rolled through, knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and injuring a group of children visiting the Mall.
Trees fell on streets, highways and railroad tracks, temperatures plunged nearly 20 degrees in 60 minutes in places, and in at least one spot almost an inch and a half of rain fell in an hour.
Over an area stretching from Loudoun County to the Maryland Eastern Shore, more than 150,000 homes and businesses lost power for at least part of the day, according to utility company figures.
Hailstones, signs of powerful updrafts, were reported in sizes ranging from marbles to baseballs, and Virginia highway authorities sent a snowplow to push them off a section of Route 29 near Ruckersville, northeast of Charlottesville.
In the District, wind gusts upended several large tents on the Mall, briefly trapping seven children and three adults who took shelter there. U.S. Park Police officers had to cut open a tent to free an 11-year-old girl. Members of the group suffered minor injuries and were taken to hospitals, said Alan Etter, a spokesman for D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services.
Terry Crews, a chaperon for a contingent of 600 children visiting from Florida, ran into one of the tents, which were set up for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It flipped over "like a big umbrella," said Crews, a sergeant in the Alachua County sheriff's department.
One girl suffered a minor head injury, Crews said.
Airplanes headed for New York were held on the ground here for as much as three hours, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.
On a single section of the Capital Beltway, four collisions brought traffic to a standstill between 6:30 and 7 p.m. The crashes occurred on the outer loop in Maryland near the New Hampshire Avenue exit, according to the state police. No serious injuries were reported.
As the storm passed, a tractor-trailer crashed into an unmarked police vehicle on Interstate 270, tying up southbound lanes near the Falls Road exit, state police said. The drivers were not seriously injured.
The day's heaviest barrage of hail apparently occurred in Ruckersville, about 90 miles southwest of Washington.
It "knocked holes as big as baseballs" in the sides of some trailers at a trailer park there, said one witness, Raymond Breeden. "It really came down."
The hailstones prompted Virginia Department of Transportation crews to rig a truck with a snowplow blade to push the hail from Route 29, a procedure termed "quite unusual" for this time of year by Lou Hatter, a department spokesman.
A wind gust of 63 mph was measured at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, and another such gust was recorded at Andrews Air Force Base, where 1.42 inches of rain fell from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. A 62 mph gust was reported at Nationals Park in the District.
At one time yesterday, Dominion Virginia Power reported 110,000 Northern Virginia homes and businesses without electricity. Just after midnight the figure had been reduced to 36,000. Pepco reported that the number of homes and businesses without power reached 26,000 at one point. By 12:11 a.m., the figure was 16,800, with a large number of homes and businesses without power in Southeast Washington.
Baltimore Gas and Electric said that 11,000 of the utility's customers lacked power for a time in the Washington area, many in Anne Arundel County. On Maryland's Eastern Shore, Delmarva power listed 4,800 homes and businesses in the dark, and the Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative gave a figure of 2,600.
The threat of lightning prompted an early closing of the Washington Monument.
Fallen trees and wires, and inoperative stoplights halted or slowed traffic across the region from
Haviland Mill Road in Montgomery County to Lee Highway and Veitch Street in Arlington. Trees on tracks disrupted the Virginia
Railway Express schedule on the Manassas line, according to the VRE Web site.
In the McLean area, wind sent a tree crashing down on two parked cars, blocking two westward lanes of Dolley Madison Boulevard.
A townhouse in Prince George's County caught fire after an apparent lightning strike, but the blaze was quelled with little damage.
Staff writers Mark Berman, Bill Brubaker, Petula Dvorak, James Hohmann, Michael Laris and Elissa Silverman contributed to this report.
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