Tornado-ish storm hits parts of Orange County and surrounding area
Amid sudden, heavy rain, high winds uproot numerous trees in clear path of destruction
When the thunder began on Friday afternoon (June 6), it was time for everybody to leave the swimming pool in Orange. Sara Spicer and her son Jensen were doing just that when Sara spotted a funnel cloud hovering near Orange County Airport. From Rt. 20, she continued north and took a left on Mount Sharon Road. Soon, they’d be home in Rapidan.
“Then when I was on Mount Sharon, it started pouring and trees were breaking,” Sara texted me on Sunday. “It was weird. I didn’t know what to think.” In retrospect, she said the whole scene hardly felt real. As she drove along, she wasn’t scared, not yet.
But things got a lot worse when she came upon fallen trees blocking the road. She and Jensen, 11, were stuck. This wasn’t a dream or a movie, but a real and terrible situation. And she had no cell signal. Now she was scared.
Sara Spicer: Son Jensen “helped me a lot”
Fortunately, the storm passed through so quickly that Sara was able to walk up the road and get a signal. She called the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and her husband, William Spicer. In the meantime, two men appeared who began clearing the road, and someone else arrived with a chainsaw. Jensen joined in, too: “He helped me a lot,” his proud mother said of the boy’s work clearing the road. With everyone pitching in, including her husband and a deputy, the Spicers were able to make it home. A relaxing day at the pool had gone completely sideways, but Sarah and Jensen were safe and had quite a tale to tell.
Around the same time Sara saw the funnel cloud, her Rapidan neighbor Patti Christie was leaving the house to go pick up her husband, Grant Christie, at Eastern View, a nearby estate where he was doing landscape work. She got as far as the corner of an open-sided shed in the backyard when she heard a roar like a freight train—a classic sign of a tornado, though an actual tornado in Rapidan was not confirmed—and saw “a shear sheet of rain” coming her way amid ferocious blasts of wind.
Rather than run back to the house or dash for her car, she ducked into the shed and hid in the back. Tools and other supplies began falling off the shelves all around her. “I’m hearing the crashing of the trees coming down, the snapping of the wire, and then I hear this thing in the back go down,” Patti told me Sunday afternoon as she showed me where she had hidden.
Farewell to the singing walnut tree
Once the storm passed, she emerged from the shed to see neighborhood power lines knocked to the ground. In the backyard, a huge tree had come within inches of the house. The Christies had called it their “singing walnut tree” due to the wind chimes they’d hung in it. But she was OK, they could hang the chimes somewhere else and Grant, who typically leaves his truck on site during a landscaping project, was able to get home on his own. For Patti, the credits rolled quickly on the brief, scary episode that had felt to her “like an action movie.”
Around the corner from the Spicers and the Christies, on the Culpeper side of Rapidan’s historic district, Alexandra Horn and her 9-year-old son, Logan, had been enjoying a carefree day until Alexandra got a weather alert on her phone.
When I paid a visit the next morning, Alexandra told me what happened once it started raining: “Logan and I went around to shut the windows. The rain was blowing inside the house. I had him get out of the family room area. There’s no attic in that area. And then I had him go in the hallway, and I just walked back out in the kitchen.”
Alexandra Horn: “A bunch of glasses came out of my cupboards”
In the midst of cooking steaks, she took another look at the hallway and the family room. The next thing she knew, “The whole tree came down, and the drywall and stuff came in on the inside of the house. A bunch of glasses came out of my cupboards and broke all over the floor. But we were OK.”
By Saturday morning, the Culpeper County code official had posted a sign prohibiting occupancy in the house, and Culpeper County Human Services had arranged for Alexandra and Logan to stay at a hotel for a couple of nights. Soon, she would get word that her insurance would help pay for temporary lodging with a kitchen.
The Horns had endured a round of trouble just a few weeks earlier, when Rapidan floodwaters lapped at their back door. But on Saturday, as she surveyed the scene including the beautiful old tree, now fallen, Alexandra remained calm. She said Logan’s safety was what mattered, and she was grateful for all the offers of help she’d received from friends and neighbors. She said lots of people had stopped to ask, “Are you guys OK?”
She and Logan are OK. She said with a weary smile that if she had to go through something like this, she was glad it happened here: “The community always comes together.”
A night to remember at the Boys & Girls Club Gala at Greenwood
On Saturday evening (June 7), the Boys & Girls Club of Orange held its biggest fundraiser of the year at Greenwood, owned by Irene and David Waddill. After the previous day’s tremendous storm, the weather gods didn’t just smile; they beamed on the elegant estate and the 185 attendees assembled for a marvelous cause.
Before the program shifted from outdoor socializing to dinner under a large tent, I chatted with Katie Hand, a member of the club’s advisory board. She told me that the “phenomenal” turnout was “a reflection of what a generous community we have. It’s wonderful that people care so much about the club.”
The Boys & Girls Club in Orange runs year-around, after school and during the summer. The average attendance in the summer is 100 children/day, according to club leadership. Children who join the popular club work on their literacy skills, learn about cooking and gardening, and go on nature hikes and field trips to museums. They also complete service projects in the community.
Going once, going twice … going to Tuscany!
When it came time for the benefit auction, items up for bid included a day of skeet shooting at Lake Anna followed by a culinary feast, a painting by Trish Crowe, a week at Smith Mountain Lake, a good-sized (and still standing) tree from Grelen Nursery and a week-long vacation at a thoroughly glamorous 15th-century villa in Tuscany. With auctioneer Todd Brown exhorting the audience to remember that all funds raised were “for the kids,” in the club, the bidding was rather cautious until he got around to the villa, aka “the castle.”
The program booklet noted that a vacation at the ancient castle offers fabulous views “overlooking the Chianti hills 30 miles from Sienna” and the chance to sample lots of head-spinningly elegant wine. All of this was choice catnip for the cool cats assembled at Greenwood. The vacation’s value was placed at $8,000, but smiling, gimlet-eyed bidders kept pushing the price tag higher. Cyd Black (bidding for herself and a group of friends) emerged as the winner—for a tidy $15,000. Take that to the bank, kids, and enjoy another great year of learning, camaraderie and adventure.
The Water Story (part 2) by Frank S. Walker Jr.
The previous issue of Byrd Street included a letter to the editor from Frank Walker and part 1 of “The Water Story,” which Frank wrote to illustrate the dire nature of the water supply situation in Orange County—a problem not solved, in case you wondered, by occasional streaks of rainy weather. In part 1, Frank and his dog, Ginger, are out on a walk when a stranger hails him from a pickup truck. The stranger, who goes by “Reliable Source,” had been looking for Frank and wants to talk about water. Here is part 2, the story’s conclusion:
Frank: The Rapidan itself can get really low in dry times. Do you know that the state has flow-monitoring equipment on the river that wirelessly broadcasts flow rates?
Reliable Source (RS): I know about it, but hooking up to it requires expertise beyond my pay grade.
Me, too, but I have a friend who gets those readings to help him decide when he can use his canoe. He checks the gauging station where Rt. 29 crosses the Rapidan. The flow is calculated in cubic feet per second flowing past the gauge. In the spring, the flow might be as high as 170. In midsummer, it is routinely at 50 or below.
RS: Wow! That’s quite a drop-off.
Yes, and he says when it gets to 50, canoeing stops being fun. He said right now it’s about 60 and going up and down with each rainstorm.
RS: Like Baylor Run.
Exactly. During last summer’s drought, it briefly dipped below 10.
RS: Holy cow! That explains why the state denied RSA’s request to pull more water out of the river.
Makes sense. Incidentally, are you on RSA [Rapidan Service Authority]?
RS: No, I’m back up in the mountains on a well. For years, I was on one that was drilled so long ago there’s no driller’s report on it at the health department. Last summer, it started to fail. I nursed it along until a driller finally got to me after Christmas. He guessed that my old well went down less than 250 feet, and he figured he would have to go down at least 300 feet.
He actually wound up going down 400 feet before getting a reasonable flow. He told me that this was getting to be routine, with 600 feet not being exceptional anymore. He recently drilled a well a couple of counties away that went down over 1000 feet before getting a satisfactory flow. He’s been in the business for decades, and what is going on now worries him.
It should. Last April, the Greene County supervisors ordered the drilling of two deep wells to augment the county’s water supply. The cost of each well when hooked up will be about a million dollars. This is being done even when it is understood that the aquifer they are drilling into has a limited capacity and that those wells are likely to fail in the foreseeable future.
RS: Sounds like one of those quick fixes you warned against. Speaking of aquifers, I’ve learned that the Potomac Aquifer east of I-95 is declining rapidly, and wells are failing.
Yeah, more wells wouldn’t appear to be an answer. That said, if the regional water supply situation is not soon addressed in a positive, long-term manner, meaningful economic growth almost has to grind to a halt. It could mean that something as basic as homebuilding would have to be curtailed.
RS: Maybe. It’s starting to get late, and I don’t drive after dark anymore than I have to. So, quick, you still think impoundments are the answer?
Yes, it’s a variation of farming. You harvest the crop when it’s ripe—in this case, when it’s falling from the sky—and you store it for later consumption. I should add that inter-basin transfers are just quick fixes that allow us to suck several rivers dry at once. As I wrote in that letter, though, we are talking many years and many, many dollars.
RS: A lot to think about. Gotta go. We’ll talk more later.
Looking forward to it. Take care.
Reliable pulled away, and Ginger led me home.
Old-timey fun with the Fun Band
The local Fun Band was in excellent form on Sunday, June 1, at The Music Room in Orange. With audience members invited to sing along, the band performed lots of sweet old songs like “Over the Rainbow,” “Moon River” and “Ain’t She Sweet.” Summer Davis-Brockman served as conductor and offered cheerful commentary throughout the concert.
The afternoon show began with the band’s youngest members performing music they’d learned in recent months, including “All Along the Watchtower” and “Let It Be.” It’s inspiring to know that our community’s talented musicians are bringing along the next generation in this warmhearted way. Keep it going, Fun Band!
Dear Rain: Enough already.
The Northern Piedmont Research Center recorded 7.55 inches of rain for May, which is quite a lot more than the month’s historic average of 3.99 inches. And this just in from the Department of Understatement: The rainy streak has followed us into June. Let’s just hope we’re done with the punishingly high winds for a (long) while.
Obituaries
Diana Dodge, 93, Orange; Erica Ann Cooper, 33, Orange; Howard Riner, 96, Gordonsville; Marilyn Wharton Hamilton, 63, Unionville; Eric Andersen, 71, Barboursville; Philip Damon Lang, 68, Gordonsville; Mary Siler Joseph, 97, Lake of the Woods.
Coming up soon
Juneteenth Freedom Day Festival, sponsored by the Montpelier Descendants Committee, 11395 Constitution Highway, 2-7 p.m., Saturday, June 14
Orange County School Board meeting, 6 p.m. (following closed session at 5 p.m.), Monday, June 16
Public meeting concerning the Rapidan Fish Passage Project (and planned removal of the Rapidan dam in Rapidan), hosted by American Climate Partners, Orange County High School, 6-9 p.m., Tuesday, June 17
Juneteenth, free community celebration sponsored by the Orange County African American Historical Society, African American Commemorative Park (corner of Church and Chapman streets), Orange, 12-2 p.m., Thursday, June 19
Recent back issues
Taxing time: Orange County transitions real estate taxes to fiscal year (June 6)
We hear a lot of the water source being depleted for a lot of different reasons but nothing about overpopulating the planet and about our wasteful lifestyle.
I'm a bit of a weather nerd. That storm was wild. I was picking up seafood at Ken's and had a great view of the approaching clouds. Didn't look that intimidating. By the time I got home two minutes later all hell had broken loose. Must have blown up really quickly.