Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 29, 1994 TAG: 9401290163
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Linden Street Southeast, on the side of Mill Mountain, is one of Roanoke's steepest. A friendly street with great views, but "more or less straight up," Tammy Bacon says.
Even scraper trucks back up the street, one house at a time, and scrape their way down, one house at a time.
Anyone who set foot outside on Linden the last two weeks has fallen down. And if you fell on any straightaway, like the street or sidewalk, you took off down the hill. Both the Bacons did, sort of like turtles that couldn't turn over.
"At one point the dog even took off down the road and couldn't stop herself," Tammy said. "It was pretty ridiculous."
Jeff tried once to cross the street and slid past the house next door. He was picking up speed when he managed to latch on to a concrete wall.
This has been especially rough because Jeff's a Krispy Kreme regional salesman who goes to work dealing doughnuts at 3 a.m. He and Tammy have been mincing their way down a narrow strip of crunchy old snow along the street to their cars down the hill and haven't missed work yet.
Hardest, though, has been getting the kids, 3 and 6, to the baby sitter. That's next-door. Down the hill.
They couldn't walk them there or even pass them hand-to-hand. It was sheer ice in between. So every day Tammy sat the children on the ice and slid them down her yard on their bottoms to the strip of ice-free earth along the baby sitter's house wall.
Another mother couldn't cross the street to pick up her baby at the baby sitter's one day. Tammy stood in the middle to pass the child but fell down and started sliding away. So she fought her way back, lay on the ice and passed the infant from the ground.
On Thursday, the family's troubles moved north. In North Roanoke County, Tammy's sister went out to warm up her husband's car. He'd had it a month.
Maybe the brake line froze in the sleet. Who knows? But when she walked away to go inside, the car took off, zipped across her driveway, across the street, down her neighbor's driveway and into the woods. It's probably totaled.
Tammy was at her legal assistant's job at the downtown law firm of Bersch & Rhodes when she got the call that topped it all.
Two giant oaks had fallen on her house. The bigger one uprooted, hit a second and they both ripped off her upper-story guttering and mushed in the front porch. One tree's so huge, Tammy said, several people holding hands might be able to embrace it.
The trees knocked down a utility pole and dropped a transformer that exploded in the street, scaring already nerve-worn neighbors half to death.
Tammy's mother took the children home with her. When Tammy had dealt with tree and utility workers long enough, she started to drive to her mother's for the night. Her car wouldn't start. So with her husband on the road, she spent the night sitting on a couch, afraid another tree was going to blow.
Tammy and Jeff keep thinking about last winter. They had their house up for sale. Buyers took one look at that hill and said forget it. They can kind of understand.
by CNB