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

DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993                   TAG: 9306060114
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: RON BROWN, LAURA WILLIAMSON and KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT?

Gusts uprooted trees, toppling them into utility lines and onto cars, knocking out electricity and telephone service for thousands of residents and injuring at least two people.

The worst injuries of the storm were apparently suffered by a West Salem woman and her daughter, who were in their car when an ancient oak fell on it as they drove along Butt Hollow Road Friday night. Carol Collins, 41, of the 2700 block of Fletcher Street in Salem, and Patricia C. Keesling, 23, were in satisfactory condition Saturday night.

Appalachian Power Co. crews were working throughout Saturday to restore power.

By 10 p.m. Saturday, about 5,500 customers served by Apco's Roanoke office were still without power.

The brunt of those outages were in Patrick and Henry counties where 3,300 customers remained without power around 10 p.m.

That compared to 14,000 without power at 10:30 Saturday morning and up to 47,300 without power throughout the night.

Customers throughout the region - which stretches west to Montgomery County, south to the North Carolina border, east to Bedford City and north to Craig County - faced warm refrigerators and cold showers.

Two thousand city residents who regained their power lost it again at 3 a.m. when the storm took out another 6,000 customers.

"Our biggest problem was trees on lines," said Victoria Ratcliff, a spokeswoman for Apco.

Apco crews were having to clear away debris from lines so they could be repaired.

Ratcliff said the storm caused more outages than during the blizzard in March, when snow kept crews from getting to lines.

Roanoke city crews were also finding that trees were the main obstacle in the storms aftermath.

Since the storm hit around 6 p.m. Friday, city crews had received 175 orders for help with fallen trees, said Ed Culp, superintendent of parks and grounds.

But filling those orders is not always easy.

City crews encountered fallen trees on four or five houses and eight to 10 cars.

Crews also had to be leery of utility wires tangled in tree limbs.

"They could be hot," Culp said. "One slip of a chain saw on a telephone line could put hundreds of people out of service."

Some city workers put in 18 to 20 hours on Friday, working their normal shifts with an emergency shift in the evening.

Culp said two small crews would work throughout Saturday night and four crews would resume a full-scale cleanup this morning. City crews had received calls for assistance with several hundred fallen trees known to be down, Culp said.

City officials have also not made a final decision on how to deal with the hundreds of truckloads of debris left in the wake of the storm.

In Northwest Roanoke, a 50-foot pin oak had toppled onto a house. In Vinton, firefighters had to use a chain saw to remove a tree blocking the entrance to a duplex.

The storm that drove so many people indoors Friday night brought professional tree-cutters out on Saturday.

Harry Rozell, of Parkway Landscapes in Floyd, said he normally doesn't work on weekends but took care of two customers Saturday.

"I had one just as soon as the storm got through," he said. "I had just finished her yard."

When the storm finished with his client, four trees were down in her yard. Rozell cleared away three of them, but a large oak blocking Brambleton Avenue prevented him from reaching the fourth.

Carpenter ants had weakened the tree, leaving it vulnerable to high winds, he said.

Kim Reich found herself doing phone duty at her boyfriend's tree-cutting business Saturday because of the storm.

"This morning the phone was going pretty good," she said at 5 p.m. "Now it's settled down."

Most people who called Treecutters Urban Forestry in Salem were asking for estimates, Reich said.

Festival In the Park, which took a hit when the storm roared through Roanoke on Friday afternoon, got back on track Saturday minus a few volunteers.

Some of those without power had volunteered to help with Festival in the Park Saturday, said volunteer Stephanie Lann.

A few called in to say they had no hot water for showers, said Lann, "and they won't come in grungy."

Work crews - and homeowners - around the New River Valley were still cleaning up after the storm Saturday, while Apco labored to restore electricity to the thousands of homes left without power.

Damage to trees and an occasional house was reported in several localities, including Blacksburg and Pulaski.

"We were pretty hard hit, said Pulaski Town Engineer John Hawley. At least three homes in Pulaski were struck by falling trees, and one was struck by two trees, Hawley said.

He said winds were so powerful during the storm that a mobile home on Newbern Road was stripped of its roof -- which flew 100 feet and ended up hanging from a cable television line.

A town water tower also was damaged in the storm, apparently just from wind. Hawley said the top of the steel tower was dented but did not leak.

The tower is on a hilltop and stretches some 90 feet into the air - making it unlikely the dent was caused by flying debris, Hawley said. He said the tower is designed to sustain hurricane-force winds.

The storm also stripped the roof off a barn in Floyd County, and littered the campuses of Radford University and Virginia Tech with fallen trees. Many trees also were toppled in the town of Blacksburg, where town crews worked Friday night and Saturday to clean streets and sidewalks of debris, said Public Works Director Adele Schirmer.

As of noon Saturday, some 18,800 customers still were without electricity in Apco's Pulaski division - which includes Giles, Montgomery, Pulaski, Carroll, Grayson, Wythe and Bland counties - said Glenda Wohlford, an Apco spokeswoman.

She said the power outages are scattered, and most were caused by trees that fell across power lines. Some 18 Apco crews, along with 12 contractor crews and another dozen crews just trimming trees, are working on the outages, she said.

"I wish I could report better news. That's just the way it is," said Wohlford - whose own home had no electricity Saturday afternoon. "We are working around the clock, and we appreciate everybody's patience."