(The following story by David Snyder and Lyndsey Layton appeared on the Washington Post website on November 7.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The sudden storm that tore through the Washington suburbs Wednesday afternoon spawned a pair of small tornadoes, caused an estimated $2 million in damage in Montgomery County and stranded hundreds of rush-hour commuters on stalled MARC trains late into the evening.
As officials yesterday surveyed the property damage caused by the storm, most of it in western Montgomery, meteorologists confirmed that two tornadoes formed between 3 and 3:30 p.m. Wednesday. They said the bigger one cut a roughly 10-mile swath through a mostly rural area near Poolesville before dissipating just west of Gaithersburg. Most of the damage was to houses and barns, officials said, adding that no serious injuries were reported.
Heavy winds damaged 12 houses in the Germantown Estates development, northwest of Gaithersburg. Three were damaged badly enough that county officials condemned them, said Pete Piringer, spokesman for the county’s Department of Fire and Rescue Services. About a dozen structures also were damaged in the Poolesville area, including a barn that was destroyed by the winds and a house that was crushed by a falling tree, Piringer said.
The smaller tornado touched down just after a heavy thunderstorm crossed the Potomac River into Montgomery from Loudoun County, said Steve Zubrick, a National Weather Service meteorologist. Its winds reached about 70 miles an hour and it died quickly, he said.
Five MARC commuter trains were stranded on the railroad for about three hours, turning about 1,000 passengers into prisoners of the Brunswick Line. The last train of the night crept into the terminal at Martinsburg, W.Va., at 1:30 a.m. yesterday, more than four hours behind schedule.
MARC officials said the trains got stuck largely because of a premature decision by CSX Transportation to reopen the Brunswick Line before the tracks were clear of debris. CSX owns the tracks used by MARC.
“It’s completely unacceptable, completely inexcusable,” said Richard Scher, a spokesman for MARC, which fielded angry calls from passengers. “Words can’t express the sympathy we feel for our riders.”
The trouble started about 4 p.m. Wednesday, when about a dozen trees fell onto the tracks between Gaithersburg and Germantown as the storm blew through the area. At that point, two MARC trains were on the Brunswick Line and were sent to the Rockville Station, where passengers got off and boarded buses for the rest of their commutes.
MARC held the remaining five trains at Union Station as CSX dispatched workers to clear the tracks. Crews focused on removing a large tree that blocked a freight train, CSX spokesman Robert Sullivan said. When that tree was cleared, about 7 p.m., CSX told MARC officials that the Brunswick Line was clear.
But they were wrong — another large tree had fallen on the rear of the freight train, preventing it from moving and forcing the five MARC trains to stop between the Rockville and Silver Spring stations. They sat on the tracks for an additional three hours, Scher said.
“It was a call that was very well-intentioned, but unfortunately very optimistic,” Sullivan said, referring to CSX’s all-clear. “These trains are long. Nobody thought there was a problem on the back of train. Everyone was focused on the front.”
MARC officials held an angry meeting with CSX representatives.
About 7,000 houses and businesses in Montgomery lost electricity during the storm, Pepco spokeswoman Denise Galivan said. Power to those customers was restored by 9 a.m., she said. About 4,200 residents in Loudoun lost power. By yesterday evening, power had been restored to all but 11 customers, said Dominion Virginia Power spokeswoman Le-Ha Anderson.
(Staff writers Rosalind S. Helderman and Phuong Ly contributed to this report.)