Ice Storm

The NWS says a winter storm is on the way and my city might get an ice storm: freezing rain possibly mixed with snow. I recall an ice storm that hit this part of the state. It wasn’t the most recent ice storm to hit the city, nor was it the worst ice storm to hit the city. But when you say the words “ice storm,” this is the storm that comes to my mind first.

I was living in Roanoke at the time. One Friday after a snowfall, I got in my Jeep and left Roanoke on highway 460. I was driving 175 miles east to visit my mother for Christmas. She was about 80 years old and lived in her home with a man in his 30s who had recently separated from his wife. (This man, Danny, and his wife had once been tenants in a house Mom had owned. Much later, when they separated, he asked my mother if he could room in her house until he could afford a place to live. So Mom let him sleep on the sofa in a little room at the end of the house, and in return he drove Mom to the store and to the doctor when she needed to go. Mom didn’t drive, and Danny needed a place to live, so for a while it was a convenient arrangement.)

In that part of Virginia, US 460 is a 4 lane highway divided by a grassy and often tree-filled median. The road that day was covered with snow and as I drove farther east I could see the effects of the ice storm. Tree limbs along the road glistened with ice in the afternoon sunlight. Farther east the ice became thicker on the limbs, until finally the shoulder of the road started becoming littered with broken limbs. Many limbs were big enough to extend onto the road surface. I knew ice coated the highway under the snow, but my Jeep wasn’t experiencing any steering issues. I figured I was safe as long as I drove straight and made no quick movements of the steering wheel.

I was five miles from the small Virginia town of Farmville and I was following about 100 feet behind a white sedan. We were going 55 mph and traffic was extremely light; there were no cars visible on the road either ahead of or behind our two vehicles. A tree limb had become weighed down with ice and had broken and fallen into the right lane of 460 east. The driver of the white sedan gently glided his vehicle into the empty left lane, as did I with the Jeep. But when he attempted to return to the right lane, his rear wheels lost traction. The sedan’s rear end went to the left, then it went to the right, then it went to the left again, and this time it kept going until the sedan was going backwards down the highway. The sedan shot off the left side of the highway and hit a snow-covered hill in the median and flipped up into the air, end over end, and came down on its roof. All this occurred in a matter of seconds right in front of me.  Despite the ice and snow on the highway, I was able to stop the Jeep before it got to the point on the road where the sedan was resting.

As I slowed to a stop and pulled the Jeep off the highway, I watched the driver of the sedan crawl out of the car through a side window. I put my window down as he walked up to my Jeep.

“Wow, that was amazing!” he said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m ok. I think I’ll walk up into the woods and lie down.” And he walked away.

I dialed 911 on my mobile and reported the accident. After I determined there was nothing more I could do to help and other drivers had gotten there and were also checking to see if they could help, I drove on.

When I reached my mother’s house and entered, it was dark. Power lines were down and the electricity was off all over the city and beyond. To run the central heat required electricity, so Danny had fired up a small kerosene heater and he and Mom were sitting near it. Except for a small space around the heater, the house was cold. There was no hot water. There was no power to run the stove, so we couldn’t cook. Mom had bought a pre-cooked Christmas dinner – enough food to feed several people – but there was no way to heat it.

I called several motels in the area but, of course, all of them were full. That night I slept with my clothes and my coat on – and lots of blankets. The next morning I called my brother Ken, who lived near Charlottesville, and asked him if he had electricity. He did.

“We don’t; the power is off here,” I told him. “There’s no heat, no hot water, no way to cook food. Can I bring Mom up there to stay with you until the power comes back on? We have a pre-cooked Christmas dinner that we can bring, too. There’s enough food for all four of us. We’ll have dinner and afterward I’ll leave and head back to Roanoke, so you won’t have to put me up for the night. But Mom needs to be there until the electricity comes back on here.”

My brother said he would talk it over with his wife and get back to me. Then he hung up. A short while later, he called back and gave me the ok to bring Mom to his house. So I did. I spent a few hours there and after dinner I drove on to Roanoke, as I had promised, arriving home after dark.

I guess you can say that ice storms can be damn inconvenient. They can cause disaster and misery. And sometimes, they bring people together.