WARSAW -- Northumberland County Administrator Kenny Eades rode a fire truck through floodwaters into the riverfront community of Lewisetta on Sunday night.

He and volunteer firefighters went door-to-door looking for people who wanted to evacuate, but they found no takers.

"People had already made arrangements and had left or had decided to stay," he said. "We thought we might have to open a shelter, but we didn't have to."

East winds pushed tides more than 2 feet above normal and flooded some of the 145 homes in the low-lying Northern Neck community. High water also flooded state Route 624 and cut off road access.

Occupying a peninsula beside the miles-wide Potomac River, Lewisetta is no stranger to floodwater. Some homeowners raised their houses on stilts after Hurricane Isabel in 2003 and Tropical Storm Ernesto in 2006 covered the area in waist-deep water.

The weekend rainstorm that caused tidal flooding Sunday and yesterday was part of a giant low-pressure system that crossed Virginia on Sunday and lodged a couple of hundred miles in the Atlantic Ocean off the Delmarva Peninsula.

Reports of trees down and isolated power failures came in throughout eastern Virginia, said Jeff Lewitsky, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Wakefield.

Caroline County closed its schools and county offices yesterday because of a power outage and trees across roadways. Parts of Caroline were without power for more than 18 hours as of yesterday afternoon, the Sheriff's Office reported.

In Stafford County, schools closed because fallen trees left many roads impassable yesterday morning, County Administrator Anthony Romanello said.

In Westmoreland County, Washington and Lee High School was closed because of water in the cafeteria, Emergency Services Coordinator Calvin Balderson said. He also said there were trees down and power outages across the county.

Lewitsky said investigators searched parts of Dinwiddie County south of Petersburg yesterday to see whether uprooted trees there were the work of a tornado. The area, along with Prince George County and other counties east of Petersburg and south of the James River, had been under a tornado warning Sunday night.

As of 9 p.m. last night, about 2,700 Dominion Virginia Power customers were without electricity, according to the utility's outage map.

No rain is expected today, but the Weather Service said coastal flooding remains possible in Norfolk.

The service's gauge in Richmond showed 4.46 inches of rain for the month as of midnight Sunday. That is 1.38 inches above normal, Lewitsky said.

Wet weather added to the woes of displaced homeowners in Stafford's England Run subdivision, where 160 houses were shredded by a tornado Thursday night.

"We have 40 families who have yet to return to their homes, either because the home is a total loss or because it's unsafe," Romanello said. "But the other 120 families are back in their homes."

The county has established a service center at a nearby fire station to help people secure county permits to rebuild or make repairs and to provide a headquarters for insurance adjusters and aid workers who have been involved in the tornado's aftermath. Contact Lawrence Latané III at (804) 333-3461 or llatane@timesdispatch.com.