Frank Lewis

PDT Staff Writer

It sounded ominous - “We’re looking at impact of greater than 50 to 60 million people,” said Louis Uccellini, head of environmental prediction for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday.

While this area will not be impacted greatly by Hurricaine Sandy, it is expected to experience high winds and an unusually large amount of rain over the period that began Sunday afternoon and continued through Monday.

“The National Weather Service is holding us to a wind advisory, and not escalating to a high wind warning for here,” said Kim Carver, Executive Director of the Scioto County Emergency Management Agency. “The expected wind gusts are still in the 45 miles an hour range for here. They’re (NWS) going to go over the products that they’ve issued for central and eastern Ohio, for which they have posted high wind warnings the further north and east that you go. But it looks like they’re going to bear the brunt of the storm.”

Carver said rainfall estimates for our region range from 2 to 3 inches, closer to 2, which she says is not going to pose any noteworthy flood issues.

“They don’t really see this as a flood event for us,” Carver said. “It is more of a wind event.”

Carver said any type of storm carries the possibility of power outages.

“Any time we have wind gusts over 45 miles per hour, and we get a sustained wind of 25 to 30, any of our weaker trees have the potential to come down into power lines and over roadways,” Carver said. “Certainly we’ll have road crews out cleaning up trees, and some utility crews out doing repairs for electric service for this event, just as if we were to have a severe thunderstorm come through here and boast winds of 45-50 miles an hour.”

Carver said she is in constant contact with the NWS and expects to keep information going out over the remainder of the week.

“We’re going to have some impact, no doubt, but it’s probably going to be isolated power outages, and tree clean up from trees that get downed that were weakened from the storms that we have had prior,” Carver said.

An assistant manager at a Lowes store in Columbus, told 10TV.com that people were calling in from West Virginia and Maryland to ask for supplies, and in northern Virginia, a cashier at Pitkins Ace Hardware in Dale City said batteries, flashlights and candles were flying off the shelves, PotomacLocal.com reported.

In upstate New York, in Syracuse, shelves normally stocked with water at a Wegman’s store were bare on Sunday, CNYCentral.com reported.