Ice storm blows over county
Area police reported several minor accidents and Dominion Virginia Power said very few of its customers were without electricity during and after the storm.
Prince William police spokesman Detective Dennis Mangan said officers reported 11 minor traffic accidents between midnight and noon Wednesday.
Police mostly kept busy directing traffic, Mangan said.
“We had a lot of trees down. We were out assisting people getting around trees and stopping traffic while they cut the trees and moved them out of the road. There were some down along (Va.) 234, along Spriggs Road and along (Va.) 619,” Mangan said.
Fallen, icy tree limbs also caused most of the problems for the power company, said Le-Ha Anderson, Dominion Virginia Power spokeswoman.
No particular area was affected more than others when area power outages began early Wednesday, Anderson said.
“It was scattered all over the place. What we found was lots of places where a tree limb had broken off and fallen into a power line and then just hung there, so our crews had to go out, knock the limb off and restore the power,” Anderson said.
“Since three o’clock this morning we have had 1,140 customers,” Anderson said Wednesday at 4 p.m. when 515 homes were without power.
“In Prince William, in the Woodbridge area, we have 70,080 customers,” Anderson said.
Manassas police reported four minor accidents and they too stayed busy helping motorists.
“We had a lot of assist motorist, you know stuck in a ditch, that kind of stuff,” said Sgt. Marc Woolverton, Manassas Police spokesman.
Jim Travers, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said today’s temperatures are likely to rise to the mid-forties and the skies would be partly cloudy.
Travers said the main roadways, despite overnight temperatures which will hover around freezing, should be dry and passable by Thursday morning.
“The surfaces which have been treated, particularly where you’ve had traffic through the night, are less likely to be problematic,” Travers said.
“In general, It will be a totally different ball game than what we had this [Wednesday] morning,” Travers said.