Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 14, 1994 TAG: 9402140079
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Dessie Moore was without electricity or running water from Wednesday to Saturday night.
She's not complaining. "See, when I was growing up, we didn't have no electricity. We just had a fire and a lamp." She is a widow, 85, and lives alone in Grayson County.
"I sewed, yeah, I sewed," she said of the last few days. She made quilts by the light of an oil lamp, using a manual sewing machine she operates with her foot.
"The other bad weather, I made two quilts," she said by phone Sunday afternoon. "This time I made three. Good weather or bad weather, I don't lose no time."
"Oh, I can see perfect. I had a cataract on my eye, but I had that taken off." She had a stroke awhile back, too, and regained strength in an afflicted hand by squeezing a ball. She lives alone in a hollow in Grayson County.
She has a wood cookstove, a wood heating stove, two oil lamps, a porch full of firewood, jugs of well water she stored last week, a creek running alongside her house and a cinderblock outbuilding full of potatoes and canned food from her garden. There's a big basket of apples, too, she said. "They'll keep till June."
Dessie Moore is one of the lucky ones. She is healthy, she knows how to survive bad weather and her electricity's back on. Thousands are still without it and some customers of Appalachian Power won't get theirs restored until week's end.
\ Police dispatchers and people working complaint lines said people are growing angrier at the ice storms and the power troubles they bring.
The latest outage was caused by hundreds of trees hitting small service lines. Utilities do better when the problem's a few big lines or transformers. Power can be restored to thousands in an instant.
This time, crews were micro-mending the power system, sometimes block by block. On some streets, houses on one side were lit up and life went on as usual, while across the street, homes were dark as tombs.
Progress was slow. Sunday morning, Appalachian Power reported 11,000 people without power around Roanoke. By late afternoon, the figure was 9,000.
At least 30 trees fell on one remote power line and other trees toppled as crews worked on it, said Apco spokeswoman Victoria Ratcliff.
In more isolated storms, the Roanoke district can borrow crews from nearby. This storm was so widespread, Apco had to reach out to South Carolina and Ohio for help.
Somebody called the city to complain that they had seen a Appalachian Power crew eating breakfast at a restaurant. Those guys should be working, the caller said. Another person complained to a police dispatcher west of Roanoke that she saw line workers napping in a truck.
Apco crew chiefs said some of their people pulled 38 hours straight Friday and Saturday, and much of that time was in icy woods. They needed a nap and hot food. Some crews, chain saws in hand, hiked along a mountainside Sunday to fix a line at Daleville.
This was the Roanoke Valley's fifth ice storm this winter. "Since the middle of December these guys have been going non-stop," Ratcliff said. Crew members were like everybody else. Many had no power at home. Some had sent their families to relatives' houses or motels. Like everybody else.
\ At lunch time Sunday, Roanoke City Manager Bob Herbert answered his front door dressed for a winter hike - parka and all. But he wasn't going anywhere.
His front hall was cold as a meat locker. Stubble covered his cheeks and chin. Herbert and his neighbors on Brymoor Road in Southwest Roanoke had been without power more than two days.
This was a democratic ice storm. It hit Roanoke's highest-paid city official.
Behind a quilt tacked to the living room doorway to conserve heat, Dori Herbert and the couple's children, Adam and Kate, sat hunched around a fireplace fire.
Their "refrigerator" of the moment was a cooler on a porch outside. Where have they been eating? "McDonald's, McDonald's, and McDonald's," Bob Herbert said.
Shortly before 1 Sunday afternoon, the lights came on. Down the street, one of Herbert's neighbors let out a whoop.
\ On Friday, a Roanoke County family lost their home and their 14-year-old terrier in a fire caused in part by the bad weather and the power outage.
Jim Ruble, of 5141 Craun Lane Northwest, said ashes flew from a wood stove and ignited furnishings when someone put wet wood in a basement stove. The family was using the stove for heat because the power and central heat were out.
When smoke began filling the house, Ruble said, the family mistakenly thought it was coming from the damp wood. He said he counts himself lucky because he, his wife, their son, daughter-in-law and grandson were not harmed. The family is staying at a Motel 6.
\ Ray Law has emphysema. He was using his emergency oxygen tanks at his trailer at the Hollins Mobile Home Park. A power outage left him unable to plug in his oxygen machine.
His daughter, Susan Beckner, has blood clots in a leg and an ulcer there that refuses to heal. She cannot wear shoes, much less boots that could carry her across the ice outside her door. She walks with a crutch. The cold in her trailer, near her mom and dad's, was making her leg hurt more than usual.
After three days without heat, Susan fluffed her comforter on her bedroom floor for her Pekingese, Nicole. Ray and Bernice Law fed their dog, Rusty, and covered up their bird's cage.
The extended family - including truck driver Allen Beckner and Dewayne Beckner, Susan and Allen's 10-year-old son - moved into the shelter at the Salem Civic Center. Saturday night, they and the Red Cross staff were its only inhabitants.
Power returned back home Sunday afternoon. They packed up their five pillows and lung machines and headed home. Susan vowed to start a shelter nearer Hollins. Many of her older neighbors were cold, but they were afraid to go to Salem. To them, she said, "It seems like a 100 miles away."
\ This ice storm twanged radio towers and took two stations off the air.
WROV-FM went out early Saturday night when power went out, ice apparently covered antennas on its Cahas Mountain transmitter and an emergency generator didn't kick on. Sunday, the station sent a bulldozer bearing a corporate engineer up the steep side of the 2,100-foot mountain. Rock 'n' roll was wailing again by afternoon.
Sunday night, country station WJLM was fighting to get back on the air. Ice apparently damaged its Northwest Roanoke antenna. J93 lost power Saturday afternoon.
\ Roanoke is trying to catch up on trash collection and recycling. Today, the city will collect Friday routes and start on the Monday routes. Tuesday, it plans to finish Monday and Tuesday collections.
\ Power was out in much of the city of Bedford. City officials declared a state of emergency and ordered pedestrians off the streets from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. An emergency shelter opened at Bedford Elementary School. Officials were relieved that the city's largest residence, the 180-man Elks National Home, has its own generator.
Todd Jackson contribution information for this story.
by CNB