10:06am: Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval

Fury of derecho in West Virginia remembered five years later

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — By all accounts, it was an historic storm.

You’ll find the derecho of June 29, 2012 included in the West Virginia Encyclopedia described as a “violent storm” that “raced across West Virginia, leaving downed trees and damaged homes in its wake.”

By definition, a derecho is a line of intense, widespread and fast-moving storms characterized by damaging winds that cover a large distance.

The 2012 derecho formed in Illinois and traveled 700 miles affecting ten states and Washington, D.C. with the hardest hits recorded in D.C., Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland, according to the National Weather Service.

Wind speeds reached 78 mph in Charleston, 66 mph in Clarksburg, and 68 mph in Beckley, records showed.

“It takes a special set of conditions for derechos to occur,” said Dave Marsalek, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Charleston. He was off on the day of derecho so experienced it initially as a spectator.

“It hit everyone,” he told MetroNews Thursday. “This was a long line of storms and it didn’t spare anyone as it went through.”

Like many West Virginians, Marsalek remembered how hot it was at the time.

“The Charleston area was up to 103 degrees that day and the next few days, after people didn’t have power, we were still in the mid to upper 90s for about the next week or so,” he said.

Temperatures climbed the following week as well.

“So it wasn’t just the storm itself, it was the aftermath.”

At one point, more than 688,000 homes and businesses in the Mountain State had no power. In some cases, it would be weeks before power was restored in the heat wave after separate storms that rolled through days later.

Three deaths in West Virginia were blamed on the derecho. Thirteen people were killed across the storm region, mainly due to falling trees in the high winds, an NWS report indicated, while 34 other deaths were attributed to heat after the power losses.

In the storm’s aftermath, the National Weather Service conducted a study of the storm and the NWS response to it.

“In general, derechos are different beasts. They’re quite expansive and they last a long time,” Marsalek said. “There’s always going to be challenges getting across the nature of the warnings when we put them out.”

Prior to 2012, the last time a derecho had been recordedĀ in West Virginia was 1991 though, for many West Virginians, the term was not known until the storm five years ago.

A derecho rolled through West Virginia on the morning of June 23, 2016 before the devastating flooding that would affect parts of central and southeastern West Virginia later that same day.





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