THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190449
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 57 lines
In many ways, Bertha wasn't this bad.
A series of thunderstorms blasted Hampton Roads on Thursday evening, bringing street-flooding rains, tree-downing winds and traffic-slowing downpours.
And then there was the lightning - strike after strike in an unbroken show of natural force that helped bring darkness to thousands of homes while producing a thunderous clamor that shook ground and nerves.
In contrast, Hurricane/Tropical Storm Bertha largely brought little more than some gusty winds and brief, heavy rains in scattered areas of Hampton Roads.
Stormy weather may continue today and, possibly, on Saturday. But there will be a payoff with cooler, drier - and quieter - weather on Sunday.
It was noisy and wet Thursday. Virginia Beach firefighters were called out to quell at least one lightning-induced blaze, and police reported several trees down in the city. Heavy rain also flooded streets at the Oceanfront's North End from 49th to 60th streets, although traffic was moving.
In Chesapeake, one storm cell pounded the Great Bridge area and police reported several homes struck by lightning, although all the resulting fires were quickly brought under control.
In Portsmouth, along Portsmouth Boulevard near Interstate 264, state police reported that rainfall was so heavy that interstate driving was treacherous and as much as 6 inches of rain covered the boulevard.
Area police departments received scores of reports of trees and limbs down in neighborhoods hit by high winds. There also were numerous traffic accidents during periods of heavy downpours.
By 8:30 p.m., almost 20,000 Virginia Power customers had been left in the dark thanks to the storms.
Junius Williams, a utility spokesman, said Virginia Beach was hardest hit. In the first wave of the storms, 4,800 customers lost electricity. The second raised that to 7,031.
Chesapeake, too, saw numbers rise sharply, from 1,200 outages in the first set of storms to 2,060 after the second.
Outages were scattered throughout the other cities and counties of Southeastern Virginia.
The National Weather Service office in Wakefield issued a series of severe thunderstorm warnings starting late in the afternoon as storm cells blossomed and rumbled east and southeast across the region.
The storms came in waves, the first around dinnertime, a second about 90 minutes later. A third line of storms moved over Hampton Roads from the northwest late Thursday night. Several areas were hit more than once.
Hampton Roads wasn't alone in the pounding. Warnings were raised from Washington to Raleigh to the Outer Banks.
The weather service said a high pressure center off the coast was pumping moist, unstable air into the region.
At the same time, a series of upper-level disturbances were triggering the storms.
``This pattern will continue through Friday, with more hot weather and scattered storms possible,'' the weather service said. by CNB