Torrential rain and thunderstorms blanketed the Hill City and much of its surrounding areas for hours on Thursday evening into Friday morning, leaving in its path downed trees, power outages and streams of water flowing through yards, parks and city streets.
The downpours forced city officials to barricade several streets, some of which remained closed into Friday afternoon. Several parks across the city remained closed, such as the spray grounds at Riverfront and Riverside parks and Miller Park pool.
Even through the deluges of rain, College Lake Dam, which nearly failed following a large rain event in August 2018, remained stable without any evacuations made downstream of Blackwater Creek. Anna Bentson, the city’s director of communications and public engagement, said water resources officials will continue to monitor lake levels.
Low-lying areas across the city bore the brunt of the downfall, City of Lynchburg’s Public Works Director Gaynelle Hart said, with places such as Peaks View Park, Sandusky Park and the Hollins Mill Dam seeing severe flooding in the area.
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Joseph Bryant, a resident near Peaks View Park, told The News & Advance that he’s lived in the area for about 50 years and said Thursday’s rainfall resulted in “one of the worst floods that I’ve seen.”
“I sat on my back porch and watched the water come up and it kept coming faster and higher and barrels and bales of straw were floating down the river,” Bryant recalled.
The stream that was created flowed into his backyard, tearing down a large tree behind his house.
“Now I don’t have a tree,” he said. “But that’s OK.”
According to Richmond Times-Dispatch Chief Meteorologist Sean Sublette, between four and eight inches of rain poured into the greater Lynchburg area, a “freak” weather event due to the three waves of the storm that rolled in throughout the evening.
“It just so happened, in this case, to go over a very populated area repeatedly in that 12-hour timeframe,” Sublette said. “These kind of things are not common, that’s why I called it a freak event.”
While other parts of Central Virginia saw a “good amount of rain” throughout the evening, Sublette said the storm was largely “localized,” adding, “it just turned out that the bullseye was right over Lynchburg,” with shades of red and purple focused squarely on the heart of the city and down U.S. 460 into Concord.
Sublette also said perhaps the most recent similar event to hit the Hill City was the August 2018 downpour that threatened the integrity of College Lake Dam and ultimately led to the realigning of Lakeside Drive, completed in 2022.
Hart later concurred that levels of rain and flooding hadn’t been seen in the city since the August 2018 downpour.
The public works director told The News & Advance that when the majority of the weather rolled in Thursday night, most of her crews were off-duty except for one 24-hour employee.
“But this storm overwhelmed this one person to respond to calls so we called in crews to respond to the flooding and downed trees,” Hart said.
She commended her crews for their “tremendous response” in coming from off-duty to go out into the field, with some members working until 1 a.m., and a smaller crew working overnight.
As the sun was coming up Friday, Lynchburg resident Roy Evans said he made it out to the Hollins Mill Dam, where he witnessed a waterfall pouring over the dam with clay-colored water.
“I knew we got a lot of rain last night but I wasn’t expecting as much as I saw,” Evans said about the water rushing through Blackwater Creek. “The creek was nearly bank-level, so it was pretty close to coming over the top.”
“I noticed some Canadian geese,” he recalled, “and they weren’t going anywhere near that water. It was truly flowing this morning.”
At the same place later in the day, students from the University of Lynchburg’s Department of Biology summer residential governor school were out collecting samples from the water rushing through Blackwater Creek to study its contamination levels and risk for humans.
“It’s given us a really good opportunity to talk about the importance of water management and runoff, and how storms can affect the transfer of bacteria and other biotic factors in places they shouldn’t be,” Jamie Brooks, a professor with the department, said.
Another round of thunderstorms brought rain to the Lynchburg-area on Friday night and with chances of rain in the area remaining throughout Sunday, according to the National Weather Service’s forecast, the city is reminding residents to use caution when traveling, do not walk, swim or drive through floodwaters, treat out-of-service traffic lights as four-way stops and to report power outages to Appalachian Power on its website.
Hart also reiterated that drivers should not drive around barricades that are posted at streets, saying doing so could pose a significant danger to residents because the road could have a down tree or be flooded.
After Appalachian Power battled outages all across Central Virginia during the rain event, power was restored to an overwhelming majority of Lynchburg, as well as Amherst, Bedford and Campbell counties early Friday evening.
Water did not just flow through outdoor areas as a result of the rain event, however. Lynchburg’s Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi sent pictures of water damage at E.C. Glass High School Friday morning showing muddy water throughout the floor of a classroom at the school.
Lynchburg City Schools said Friday that their facilities and maintenance teams are currently assessing the impact of flooding in a handful of rooms at Glass. They added that most of the areas are non-classroom spaces and they will be ready to welcome students back in August.
"I sat on my back porch and watched the water come up and it kept coming faster and higher and barrels and bales of straw were floating down the river."
- Joseph Bryant, resident near Peaks View Park