Widespread flooding, power outages hit Surry County

Surry County was inundated Thursday and Friday, with strong and gusty winds added to the mix overnight and into Friday morning, shutting down schools, flooding businesses, and leaving thousands without power.

The foul weather was cause by bands of heavy rain and high winds sweeping ahead of the Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in Florida Thursday night and crept northward through Georgia and the Carolinas.

The National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Virginia, issued and extended warnings for Surry County and the surrounding region several times Thursday evening and through the day on Friday. Surry County, along with Yadkin, Stokes, and Rockingham counties and Patrick and Carroll counties in Virginia, remained under a flash flood warning and a tornado watch through much of the day, with some weather alerts warning of life-threatening flooding in the region. Rainfall totals were not available Friday afternoon, but various portions of Surry County had seen 4 to upwards of 8 inches of rain over the previous day or two.

Widespread power outages accompanied the storm. Surry-Yadkin Electric Corporation reported more than 12,000 customers without power across its two-county region at the worst of the storm. The largest of those outages were in the Jonesville-Elkin area.

Duke Energy reported hundreds of thousands of customers without power across the Carolinas. Locally, several thousand Surry County customers spent time in the dark, with the largest Duke outages in the Mount Airy and Pilot Mountain regions of the county.

The rain sent creeks and rivers over their banks throughout Surry County and the surrounding region, with low-lying areas, roads, and some businesses being flooded. In Elkin, parts of downtown were underwater Friday, with North Carolina Department of Transportation shutting down the Elkin-Jonesville bridge and other access roads into town

In anticipation of the move, area schools, including Mount Airy, Surry County, and Elkin closed early Thursday and announced they would remain closed today. Local EMS and utility officials also spend the week ramping up, preparing equipment and crews for extended work clearing roads, restoring electricity, and being ready to help those in need because of the weather.