Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994                   TAG: 9401260030
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THIS TOO WILL PASS, WITH A LITTLE HELP

A week of driving with no assurance that braking will slow the car; a week of creeping along familiar sidewalks turned treacherous; a week of fretting about elderly friends and relatives; of broken water pipes and claustrophobic closeness, of brown-out threats and darkened corridors, closed schools and sore throats and elaborate survival plans for retrieving the mail.

A week of this is really, truly, entirely enough.

A virtual heat wave, with temperatures soaring above freezing, is promised for this weekend. It cannot arrive a minute too soon.

And whether you attack the bitter enemy head on, pounding and scraping the infernal ice from your path, or chill out and sit back to watch nature vaporize it, it may help soothe snappish tempers and cabin-fevered brains to reflect on how much worse it could have been - and on the helpful, quietly heroic efforts of people who made sure it wasn't.

Sure, lots of secondary roads remain covered with ice, hard and smooth as concrete and a whole lot slicker when wet. They are dangerous, and will continue to be as the ice melts off. Many streets that are passable, at least, after normal winter storms have been frozen solid since Monday.

But this was not a normal storm. The salt and chemicals that normally eat away at snow and ice don't work when temperatures dip into the single digits and below. And the thermostat seemed to be frozen solid right around the zero mark, meaning the warm days that normally help clean up after subfreezing nights never materialized.

Road crews working 14-hour days did a great job of scraping and spreading sand on major thoroughfares, making it possible to keep essential businesses operating.

Those who braved both the cold and the ice to keep stores open, information flowing, emergency services going, so we all could survive this deadly blast, deserve thanks and respect.

Those hills that were cleared, the mail that was delivered, and the newspapers that did land on doorsteps (or pretty close) represented tremendous dedication and hard work.

The visiting nurses who, somehow, made their rounds to homebound patients; the doctors, nurses and support staffs that kept medical offices and hospitals running; the firefighters and paramedics who conquered a glacier-like hill to pull a sick man out to get help; the police officer whose patrol car slid right over an embankment; the bus drivers who waited for passengers slipping and sliding to their doors, helped them aboard and drove them safely to work and home again; the workers who kept stores open to sell food and medicine; the folks who run shelters to protect the homeless; the truck drivers who delivered fuel when homes were running low; the plumbers who worked grueling hours to repair frozen and burst pipes - all of these people, and many more, deserve the community's gratitude.

All of these people were just doing their jobs, but doing them under extraordinarily difficult conditions. And for that, they acted extraordinarily.

It's been one long, cold and, for many people, exhausting week. But it's been warmed considerably by the reassuring acts of helpfulness and humanity all around us. And if that isn't enough to shake the lingering chill, well - here comes the sun.