THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 6, 1996 TAG: 9602060270
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
A few hundred screaming, squealing kids and adults raced up Mount Trashmore Sunday morning and headed downward on anything that would make a good slide.
It was the kind of winter paradise rarely seen in Hampton Roads. But it didn't last long.
By early afternoon, the few hundred sledders turned into more than 3,000, the powdery snow turned icy and the overcrowded hillside turned into bedlam.
About 20 people were treated for injuries, authorities said, 13 were taken to the hospital and two required surgery for abdominal injuries.
The city began limiting access to the hill about 1 p.m. and closed it entirely at 5. It was closed again Monday and will not reopen today, city officials said.
City Manager James K. Spore said he didn't have any choice.
``Both hospital emergency rooms called and asked us to close it,'' he said. ``It was unsafe. We had a significant number of people injured, and we felt if we couldn't reasonably provide a safe environment, we shouldn't let people use it.''
Park officials said they hated shutting down the slide - their job is to help people have fun.
``This park is not equipped as a winter resort area,'' Parks and Recreation Department Director Susan D. Walston said Monday.
Walston and her staff spent the day trying to figure out how to make the only real hill in town safe for sledders.
Parks Administrator Ray A. Emerson said he wanted to to set up a committee of parks employees, police, rescue squad members and citizens to figure out how to fit so many rapidly moving people into such little space. He hopes to finalize plans for a committee this week.
``We need to come up with a way to make it a safe environment,'' Emerson said. ``It seems that we get so many people there that it gets rather chaotic and out of control, and we need to come up with a way to deal with that before we reopen it to those kind of activities.''
Part of the problem, Emerson said, was once the crowd grew so large, competition to find new and better routes down the slope became fierce. The steep face visible from Route 44 offered the fastest ride, but the packed parking lot at the bottom made for some rough landings.
Others headed down the shorter side of the hill and wound up sliding into traffic on Edwin Drive. One girl, sledding down the back side on Saturday, couldn't stop and found herself in frigid Lake Trashmore, where she was fished out and taken to the hospital for minor injuries, officials said.
Medics waited for sledders at the bottom of the hill where four ambulances from three squads shuttled the injured to Beach General, Sentara Bayside and Sentara Leigh hospitals.
``It's really kind of a (mind)boggling situation,'' Emerson said. ``We've just grown as a city and Mount Trashmore is not large enough to handle the crowds that it draws. We're just kind of overwhelmed when things like this happen.''
Mount Trashmore Park is no stranger to overwhelming crowds. More than 800,000 people visited the city's most popular park last year, climbing Kid's Cove's wooden jungle gyms, packing the 91 picnic tables and walking, jogging or biking along 3.5 miles of trails.
The Parks Department hopes to spend more than $1.6 million over the next few years to refurbish the park: removing out-of-date equipment such as the skateboard ramps and the soapbox derby track, expanding wheelchair accessibility, and improving the water quality of the lake, which has been off-limits to boaters and swimmers since 1991. MEMO: Staff writer Tom Holden contributed to this story.
KEYWORDS: WINTER STORM MOUNT TRASHMORE by CNB