ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 9, 1996 TAG: 9601110048
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
Susan Witt, one of several hundred Southwest Virginia residents who sought shelter from the snowstorm, didn't mind the fact that her refuge turned out to be a funeral home.
``I was so cold,'' Witt said by phone Monday from the Province Funeral Home in Scott County, where 70 percent of the residences, including hers, had power knocked out by the storm.
``My landlord finally got his car dug out, and he got me here,'' Witt, 25, said of the funeral home, one of the few places in the county that still had electricity. She arrived at 7 p.m. and, after a home-cooked meal, ``I slept good.''
There were 23 shelters opened overnight in Virginia, most of them in the far southwest where more than 15,000 homes had no electricity because the storm knocked down power lines.
About 600 people spent Sunday night in the shelters. Half of them were stranded bus riders who stayed at the Arthur Ashe Jr. Athletic Center in Richmond near the Greyhound Bus Lines.
Thousands of travelers across the state checked into hotels to wait out the storm.
Don Scott, the emergency services coordinator in Scott County, said people were coping well with the snowstorm, and few needed to use the shelters.
``A lot of folks have wood-burning stoves or kerosene heaters for backup,'' Scott said. ``People living in this climate and terrain, where we have floods, storms and periodic power outages, are prepared for it. Like people on the East Coast are prepared for hurricanes and tornadoes, we have our survival kits and backup systems.''
The main problem was that people who needed to refill their kerosene heaters couldn't get the fuel at local convenience stores because they use electric pumps to get it out of the tanks, Scott said.
On Monday, the National Guard hauled two 5,000-gallon fuel oil tanks into the coalfields.
Many people were taken from unheated homes to shelters or relatives' homes by the Virginia National Guard, which had 295 guardsmen on duty Monday using 90 high-mobility multiwheeled vehicles, or humvees, and six armored personnel carriers.
The Guard also was used in medical emergencies. When an ambulance could not get to a house in Wytheville where a person was suffering from hypothermia, a humvee towed it to the house and back to a paved road. A humvee also was used to take a patient with kidney problems to a Winchester hospital for dialysis treatment.
Maj. Pete Combee was unsure how many missions the guardsmen undertook Monday, because they were so busy. ``It's very hard for our people to even have the time to put down their troop reports.''
Cheryl Clark, 18, was snowbound in her Rockbridge County farm house when labor pains started Sunday night.
An emergency services vehicle with four-wheel-drive became stuck on the way out Monday, backed out, but could only get within a mile or so of her house.
Her mother called around and found a few people who had experience delivering babies and could make the trek to see Clark, whose baby is due Friday.
``My mom and dad were really worried about me,'' she said. ``I just couldn't take walking a mile. The snow was up to my knees.''
Finally, as the false labor pains began subsiding, an uncle with a four-wheel-drive tractor made it to the house and ferried her to the main road, where she was driven to her parents' house near a hospital in Lexington.
``I almost had a snow baby,'' she said Monday afternoon.
LENGTH: Medium: 71 linesby CNB