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When will the lights come back on? That was the most asked question The Herald received last night. In multiple parts of Prince Edward County, residents were coming home to pitch black houses and wanted to know how long that would last. The answer, unfortunately, was most of the night. 

By 4 a.m., Dominion work crews had brought all the systems here back online. The same went for most of the region. The only ones still struggling at that point were in Lunenburg County, where the power remained off for 340 residents as of 6 a.m. Some Lunenburg homes were still in the dark this morning for the same reason it took so long to get the lights back in Prince Edward. The majority of these homes are out in rural areas. 

Monday night, work crews spent part of the time cutting down trees fallen across the road, as well as clearing debris and in some cases just flat out inventing new pathways in order to get to damaged lines. The outages in Prince Edward focused around two areas. At its peak, 1,034 people in Pamplin, Prospect and Tuggle were without power. Another 1,317 were in the dark as well around Rice. There were also less than 200 affected in Farmville. 

The damage in Farmville, however, wasn’t nearly as bad as expected. On Monday afternoon, multiple businesses closed hours early, out of concern for a series of storms the National Weather Service claimed could have wind speeds up to 75 mph. It didn’t quite reach that high Monday night and it appears this area dodged the other issues completely. The NWS had warned of quarter-sized hail and flash flooding. But as of 6 a.m. today, there were no areas in Prince Edward, Cumberland or Buckingham that had reported flooding. 

Quickly passed through Prince Edward

These storms were part of a system the National Weather Service had been tracking for several days. Instead of sticking around, like the original forecast indicated, most of the storms had made it to the coast by 8 p.m. The good news is that we won’t have an opportunity for a repeat performance until Saturday. The forecast through Friday calls for sunny skies in Prince Edward County, with clouds and potential thunderstorms rolling back in Saturday afternoon.