Tornado in Stafford Co. Last Night

There was some serious weather last night (to say the least) and I was listening for several hours on the (handheld) scanner. Stafford County's channels were the busiest I've ever heard them. It almost seemed at one point that they could have used another repeated channel or two on the Fire side. I'm sure the simplex equivalents of all the repeated channels were in heavy use, but for the most part I couldn't hear those from my location in Spotsylvania.

Stafford requested aid from as far away as Fairfax and Henrico. I'm not sure if the Henrico units ever showed up, but the much-respected Technical Rescue Operations Team (TROT) from Fairfax came to help. This team has expertise in confined-space rescues and searching for people in collapsed structures. Other jurisdictions helping out were Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Quantico Marine Corps Base, Prince William, and Fauquier.

Here are some frequencies/talkgroups monitored last night and today:

• Stafford appears to be using 489.3125 [156.7] on the Sheriff side and 489.1125 [156.7] on the Fire side for command post operations as of today. The simplex equivalents of these channels are also being used heavily. When the storm was at its peak, all of Stafford's Fire channels were in use constantly.
• Spotsylvania Fire used talkgroup 00-103 (Channel 4) for storm-related operations when the storm was at its peak. A lot of the traffic was dealing with clearing trees and checking flooded roads.
• STARS talkgroup 2407 (VA Department of Emergency Management Ops 1) was active very briefly this morning with a unit saying that he was doing a storm survey in Spotsylvania. I searched for the 800 MHz control channel of the STARS mobile site (thinking that it may have been dispatched to Stafford), but did not find it.
• VDOT active on 47.4000 [114.8].
• Dominion Virginia Power active on 451.2750 [114.8].
• Rappahannock Electric Cooperative active on 153.7100 [156.7].
  
• 145.2700 [79.7] was active today with some traffic from hams manning an emergency operations center in conjunction with Stafford authorities and the Red Cross. Surprisingly, little to no traffic monitored last night during the storm.