Neighbors chip in to help after storm

Fletcher Goodrich Jr. was headed home from Alabama on Tuesday night when his wife called to tell him about a storm that was battering Suffolk.

“This is what I do for a living,” Goodrich said on Wednesday, as he repaired a chainsaw in his Dayle Acres Road driveway. “I help the homeless. Now, I’m one of them.”

Goodrich works full time for Operation Blessing International, a Virginia Beach-based Christian charity that comes to the aid of disaster victims around the world. He was driving some equipment from Alabama, where a series of deadly tornados struck last month, to Hampton Roads-area warehouses when he got the call Tuesday night.

An uprooted tree had slammed into the middle of Goodrich’s roof during Tuesday’s storm. Another tree from his front yard lay across the road. In his backyard, his shed sat crookedly against a mound of dirt formed by yet another uprooted tree.

He was one of dozens of neighbors on the North Suffolk road who helped clear the neighborhood streets and yards with chainsaws on Wednesday. City staff and utility companies were on site all day orchestrating with the cleanup and recovery effort.

Many residents of the street that runs off Nansemond Parkway near the Chesapeake city line were convinced that a tornado had barreled through their neighborhood. But the National Weather Service visited and determined there was no twister — just straight-line winds of up to 100 miles per hour.

“It’s mainly determined by the damage,” said Lyle Alexander, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Wakefield office. “The objects were all laying in the same direction. There wasn’t any tendency for the things to be converging like there would be with a tornado.”

Indeed, all the downed trees in the neighborhood fell to the east. Most landed on homes or vehicles.

“I saw the tree hit the truck,” said Ralph Kirby, who took refuge in his bathroom with his wife, their 19-year-old son and two of his friends. “I saw what looked like a big dust cloud. I heard the hail hitting the house.”

The group crouched on the floor and “prayed we’d make it through,” Janice Kirby said.

“Things can be replaced,” she said. “We can’t. That’s the thing we have to remember.”

Helen Respess ended up with four trees in her backyard after the storm blew through. Fortunately, none caused any major damage to the house.

“That was powerful,” she said. “Some of those trees have been there for hundreds of years.”

Respess had been sitting on her back porch, which faces the west, when the storm was on its way. She said it came on so suddenly that she barely had time to get into the house.

“I had to come in and slam the door,” she said. “You couldn’t see anything. I had to push as hard as I could to get the door closed.”

Respess once took refuge in a closet, but then decided she wanted to see what was going on outside.

“Everything was gray, and it was real thick, and you could see stuff flying,” she said. “There was nothing but all this gray.”

The damage to her home was less severe than for some of her neighbors.

“I feel so blessed,” she said as she watched family members wield chainsaws on the fallen trees in her backyard. “My heart just pours out to my neighbors that have lost so much. They’re some mighty nice, good people.”

Elsewhere in Suffolk, trees fell on at least half a dozen houses. Some places were still without power Wednesday, and Dominion Virginia Power estimated full power might not be restored until Thursday.

According to city spokeswoman Debbie George, the city’s community development division estimates damages of about $475,000 to 19 residential buildings. Between 4 and 8 p.m. Tuesday, city 911 lines handled a total of 550 calls, she added.

At the Suffolk Executive Airport, a small plane flipped over and hit a power pole when the aviator stopped to refuel. He had just gone in the building when the wind gust flipped the aircraft.

The only injuries that have been reported to the city occurred when a man fell from his roof in the 3600 block of Pasture Cove, and when a tree fell into a moving vehicle on Whaleyville Boulevard. None of the injuries were serious, George said.