A snow and ice storm brought power outages to a large number of Mathews residents on Monday, with 2,500 customers without power at once during the peak of the storm.
The height of the outages occurred between 6 and 9 a.m. on Monday, said Dominion Energy spokesman Cherise Newsome, but by 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, only 75 Mathews customers were still without power.
In Gloucester, about 1,000 customers were without power during the peak of the storm at around 3 a.m. Monday, she said, but by Tuesday morning, all but around 42 customers had their power restored.
Throughout the Middle Peninsula as a whole, about 3,500 customers lost power during the peak of the storm-related outages, which occurred overnight Sunday into early Monday morning, said Newsome.
The storm occurred in the middle of a stretch of unusually cold weather for Virginia, said National Weather Service meteorologist Nancy Moll of the Wakefield station. Temperatures were well below average, with a high of just 30 degrees in Richmond on Monday, 18 degrees below the average. Norfolk temperatures were similar, she said, estimating that, on average, temperatures across the southeastern portion of the state were at least 15 degrees colder than usual.
There wasn’t as much snow in Gloucester and Mathews as had been forecast, said Moll, with 1.2 inches to 1.5 inches accumulating overnight on Saturday, but there was more ice than expected, ranging from 0.1 inch to 0.25 inch after a day of freezing rain on Sunday.
Moll said that no freezing rain is forecast for the upcoming week, but a possible snow storm over the weekend “could be pretty impactful.” She said it is expected to bring with it stronger winds and possibly some associated coastal flooding.
Temperatures will continue to be very cold throughout the week, said Moll, not getting above freezing until next Monday, when it will warm up to “just above freezing.”
“It’s pretty anomalous for our area,” said Moll. The good news, she said, is that there doesn’t seem to be any more ice forecast in our immediate future.
The ice storm resulted in remote learning days in both Gloucester and Mathews schools. Monday was a scheduled teacher work day in Mathews County Public Schools; however, both Tuesday and Wednesday were remote learning days, with teachers distributing instructional materials on Friday. In Gloucester schools, both Monday and Tuesday were remote learning days, with a two-hour delay on Wednesday.
