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Winter starts out windy, wet and warm in West Virginia

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Rain continued to fall Sunday in parts of West Virginia following a Saturday night of strong spring-like thunderstorms that knocked out power to thousands of state residents and sent water into some roadways.

Storms brought rain and high winds to many parts of the state after a warm first day of winter on Saturday.

“Mostly, we’re just kind of keeping an eye on it, watching for flooding,” Liz Sommerville, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told MetroNews on Sunday.

“There is the chance some streams and creeks, especially, could make their way out of their banks with all the rain we’ve had.”

As of Sunday morning, the National Weather Service had issued no flood watches or warnings for West Virginia counties.  However, in the Eastern Mountains, wind advisories were in effect because of the possibility of wind gusts of 50 mph or more throughout the day.

Late Saturday, wind gusts of 64 mph were recorded in Athens, Ohio while, in Williamstown in Wood County, one gust hit 60 mph.  In other parts of West Virginia, winds were in the 40 mph to 50 mph range.

Repair crews with both Appalachian Power and First Energy, the parent company of Mon Power and Potomac Edison, were out on Sunday.  At 10 a.m. Sunday, Appalachian Power was reporting 10,766 outages while First Energy was working to restore power to 5,067 homes and businesses.

Most of those outages were expected to be addressed on Sunday.

The storms followed an unseasonably warm Saturday, the first official day of winter, that saw several high temperature records broken across the Mountain State.

The official high in Charleston on Saturday was 75 degrees, beating a record set in 1990.  High temperatures Saturday in Huntington, 75 degrees, Elkins, 74 degrees, and Beckley, 67 degree, also broke records.

Sunday was also a mild day, but Sommerville said that would not be the case by Monday.  “We won’t get much warmer after tonight (Sunday),” she said.

The forecast was calling for temperatures in the 30s and low 40s, in much of West Virginia, for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.





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