BLIZZARD OF VISITORS BURIED TOWN WYTHEVILLE WAS STOPPING PLACE FOR THOUSANDS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 16, 1993                   TAG: 9303160232
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium
BLIZZARD OF VISITORS BURIED TOWN WYTHEVILLE WAS STOPPING PLACE FOR THOUSANDS
This town is usually glad to get as many visitors as possible, but the community found itself overwhelmed during the weekend blizzard.
Stranded motorists booked all of Wytheville's 1,255 motel rooms. Emergency shelters housed more than 1,100 others at George Wythe and Fort Chiswell high schools, Spiller Elementary School and the Wytheville Community Center.
Wythe County Sheriff Wayne Pike, interviewed on radio stations from nearby states, advised people to stay away for now.
A police chief from a small town near Cleveland got stranded along with a prisoner he had picked up in North Carolina. The chief was working as a volunteer at the jail. "Kind of fit right in," Pike said.
The same happened at shelters. Angie Kessler from Twinsburg, Ohio, volunteered to help in the kitchen. Ed McCarnes, a teacher from Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., answered phones and gave information to hundreds stranded along with him at George Wythe High.
"We adopted him," said Curt Campbell an assistant superintendent for county schools. Campbell and his colleague Larry Bond had been at the school for two days and two nights.
McCarnes, who teaches communications, had come into the school's office Sunday and asked if he could help.
Restrooms were the first stops for many coming into the shelters, he said. Next came food, provided by emergency crews and grocery stores. McCarnes was eating pizza within an hour of arriving.
People sprawled in auditorium seats, stretched out on wrestling mats in the gym or in sleeping bags in hallways, and strolled through the building. Many lined up at the school office trying to find out which roads were open or to work out alternate routes to get home.
Some had been forced to leave their cars. After road conditions improved Monday, most eventually got rides back to their vehicles.
"It's been real good here," said Steve Morrison, an Army man stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y. He hoped to stop at Wytheville on his next trip and look up friends he had made, "when things are a little better."
Wythe County Community Hospital, where five babies were born over the weekend, was not an officially designated shelter. But it hosted motorists who got that far and stayed put.
Several roofs collapsed over the weekend at businesses in Independence, in neighboring Grayson County. Another fell Monday afternoon at Wytheville in the Evansham Shopping Center over the former site of the Pic'n'Pay Shoe Store. The store was empty.
Safety officials closed all the stores - including Rose's, Super-X Drugs and Food Lion - at least until today, when the damage could be assessed.
Interstates 81 and 77, which cross just east of Wytheville, were closed over the weekend. For most of the day on Monday, traffic was moving, but slowly.
A section of the highway from Fort Chiswell into Bland County was closed again Monday night when traffic jams occurred. Some shelters were reopened in Wythe and Bland counties.
Earlier Monday, traffic stalled for 25 miles from Carroll County into North Carolina on northbound I-77. People were out of their cars, playing in the snow, partying with neighbors and - at one place - playing golf along the highway.
Interstates and primary roads were passable with caution, but highway officials were not encouraging people to leave shelters. "We're still asking them to wait at least one more day," Dan Marston, with the Bristol District office of the state Department of Transportation, said Monday afternoon.
All of Wytheville's volunteer firefighters were called in during the weekend, and, with rescue squad volunteers, helped stranded motorists, answered emergency calls ranging from heart attacks to diabetes problems, and staffed emergency shelters, said Albert Newberry, Wytheville public safety director.
"There's a countless number of lives these people have saved," Sheriff Pike said of the emergency workers. He praised the efforts of a reserve officer from his department and a private citizen who worked for hours opening a way for Appalachian Power Co. to get through on Virginia 600 and Virginia 603 to restore power to residents in northeastern Wythe County.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB