TOWSON, Md. — Climbing a ladder is probably one of the last things you think about doing when it’s this windy out. But for Charm City Roofers, duty calls.
“It’s a little risky. We were on the fence today of whether we were gonna work. But we decided that we should be okay,” owner Roger Bush said.
Crews with the roof repair company were responding to calls throughout Baltimore County and Baltimore City all day on Monday.
“Just right down the road is a commercial building and the entire roof just blew off like a blanket,” referring to Need 4 Things, a collectibles shop in Arbutus. “It’s laying and covering the front of the building so we’re working right now to get that cleaned up and tarped up. In Kingsville, yesterday, we [saw] a tree that went down through a roof; that one was pretty rough, but just a lot of missing singles mostly, nothing too terrible,” Bush said.
“It just blew off. And all this stuff blew off with it,” Jack Blankenship, owner of Need 4 Things, told WMAR-2 News. “Windy as heck. Wind was blowing through like crazy man.”
With power restored, and repairs in progress, he was looking forward to opening back up on Wednesday.
In Towson, Corina Fratila was on a mission of her own.
“Well my children don’t want to eat what I have at home because it’s not warm, so I started walking down the street to see if I can find some food here. Everything’s closed."
The wind brought down a couple of large trees on Charles Street; homes and businesses in the neighborhood lost power around 4 p.m. on Sunday.
“Supposedly at 9:30 this morning it was supposed to come back on, but when I went and I talked to the people on Charles Street who are doing the repairs, they said it’s probably going to be at least another 5 hours,” Fratila said.
As of 4:30 p.m. Monday, close to 22,000 BGE customers are still without power. The utility company has been steadily chipping away at that number over the last 24 hours.
Below is the latest update from BGE:
As of 4:30 p.m., approximately 21,891 customers are without service, accounting for slightly more than 1,700 restoration jobs in locations across central Maryland. BGE has restored service to over 100,000 impacted customers, representing 80% of outages since the onset of the widespread windstorm event that began yesterday afternoon.
There are approximately 1,000 people working on storm restoration and customer support including field crews, operations and safety crews, as well as support personnel including logistics and customer care representatives. 800 additional line workers will arrive tomorrow to supplement current crews.
The vast majority of customers should be restored by 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19. The latest outage information, including total number and general locations, is available on the BGE.com outage map [bge.com].