By Bill Archer
BLUEFIELD — Southern West Virginia and Southwest Virginia wound up being smack-dab in the middle of another El Niño storm system this weekend, but the severity of the storm varied from place to place.
For example, Bluefield got pelted with a mixture of six inches of granulated ice and snow that measured a whopping 1.79 inches of melted precipitation, while Grundy, Va. and parts of McDowell County only got rain.
“I’m not complaining,” Deputy M.D. Pertee of the McDowell County Sheriff’s Department said. “Everything is running like normal.”
Part of U.S. Route 52 was blocked for a time due to a rock slide, but the Kimball Volunteer Fire Department and West Virginia Department of Highways had that problem cleared up in less than an hour. However, a State Police dispatcher in Wytheville reported snowfall totals in the 8-10-inch range, and snow-removal crews in Bluefield worked around the clock to deal with the heavy, wet snow.
The storm took a toll on the old Cox’s department store building on Federal Street in Bluefield’s historic district where an awning collapsed under the weight of the snow. The persistent snow was also apparently taking a toll on local residents. Larry Jackson, 69, of Stadium Drive in Bluefield, called the newspaper Saturday morning when he couldn’t get satisfaction by contacting city hall.
“Will you write my story, or are you in with them?” Jackson asked. “I have a pile of snow 6-feet wide, 4-feet tall and 8-feet wide blocking my driveway. If it was a car, the city police would write them a ticket for blocking my driveway. I called the city manager’s office twice last week, but no one pays any attention to me. I have a heart condition and I’m too old to dig it out. My son helped me for a while last week, but he’s old too.”
Dallas Fowler, director of the Bluefield street department said that crews worked around-the-clock starting Thursday and continuing through Saturday in an effort to keep the main streets open. “We have received complaints from people who are upset because their driveways are plowed in, but I don’t think they realize how much snow we have had, or how much more time it would take to clear every driveway.
“The snow was coming down so hard on Friday, that we would finish clearing a street and have to go right back out and clear it again,” Fowler said. “It has been a never-ending cycle, but we’ve worked solid ... non-stop ... through this storm and through the storms before. We get complaints and sometimes, we get pats on the back. We have shoulders broad enough that we can handle either one.”
The storm brought challenges to Appalachian Power Company repair crews, with 39,040 customers in Virginia without power according to APCO’s “Storm and Outage Details” 11 a.m., Saturday report. APCO reported 1,000 Tazewell County customers without electrical service in that report as well as 2,900 customers in Wythe County, Va., who had lost power. By mid-afternoon, APCO reported 641 Tazewell County customers still out as well as 230 customers out in Mercer County.
“This is an El Niño year, so you have to expect a lot of snow like this,” Ken Kastor, meteorologist with the Blacksburg, Va., office of the National Weather Service said. “You had strong winds there Friday night, but the storm didn’t meet all of the conditions it needed to meet in order to be considered a blizzard. There were some spots in Maryland and Delaware closest to the coastal region where the storm had blizzard conditions, but not out in the mountains.”
Kastor said the ice and wet snow combination are typical of some El Niño years. The El Niño storms are driven by warm waters over the tropical region of the Pacific Ocean. A good example of a strong El Niño year was the winter of 1997-’98, when a late January storm dumped more than 20 inches of snow that seemed tinted blue on the area and crippled southern West Virginia for almost three weeks.
Storm systems driven by cold waters in from the Pacific are called La Niña years, and can deliver intense storms characterized by drier snow like the heavy snow that blanked Four Seasons Country in during the first week of January in 1996.
“We were lucky,” Kastor said. “Places like Frostburg, Md., reported 36 inches of snow. There were places in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia that reported big snowfall totals like Hampshire County with 34 inches, but we didn’t have anything like that.”
The National Weather Service is forecasting a partly sunny day today, with a high near 27 degrees. However, the Weather Service is forecasting a 30 percent chance of snow for Monday night, a 60 percent chance of snow on Tuesday, with snow changing to rain and back to snow on Tuesday afternoon into Tuesday night.
– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com
