Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 15, 1994 TAG: 9402150282
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At the Comfort Inn in Blacksburg, no comfort for the weary without reservations - the motel is sold out through the end of the week.
Bill Rippe at the front desk said, "It's pretty much been a madhouse, phone constantly ringing, people walking in and out."
Motel employees have seen Dalmatians, Scotties, a dog so tall it came up to its owner's waist, and Monday night a bird roosted under their roof. The Inn has 80 rooms, with water and electricity.
The emergency shelter at Blacksburg Middle School closed Monday at noon, after 35 people stayed Sunday night. It planned to stay closed unless the Red Cross received a large number of calls. The shelter had cots, showers and free food, though visitors brought their own blankets.
"We really expected to have more people than we did," said Montgomery County Red Cross executive secretary Debbie Ingram.
Radford's shelter at 29 First St. will be open through tonight, though no one slept there Sunday night. Calvin Whitt said only 14 people slept at the shelter over the entire weekend. "A lot of people stayed home," he said. "A lot of it was confidence in the [power] system."
Only one person planned to stay in the Christiansburg Fire Department social room shelter Monday night, though 35 English Meadow nursing home residents remained there. English Meadow is still without power and phones, and is repairing fire damage suffered in a Friday morning blaze.
The Imperial Motor Lodge in Blacksburg was without power until Monday morning, and couldn't capitalize on demand, owner Praful Sanghani said. He estimated they lost $3,000 of business from canceled Valentine's Day weekend and regular reservations. And don't even talk about the weather-generated demand. "I think we must've had 300, 400 calls," Sanghani said. "Every second, the phone was ringing. We had 44 empty rooms and couldn't rent them."
Shoppers swept the shelves clean of emergency supplies in area stores over the weekend.
K mart shipped in more camping equipment, candles, bottled water and batteries from Greensboro on Sunday, manager Greg Edel said, as all those had sold out by Friday afternoon, the batteries on Saturday. By Sunday morning, they'd sold out again.
Blacksburg, where residents were without water until Sunday morning, water distribution was scaled down to one site. Town Manager Ron Secrist said he'd heard that only about one person an hour was coming by on Monday.
Local restaurants reported lots of business from residents without power, and most found a way to cope with the water shortage. Subway in downtown Blacksburg stopped washing dishes on Saturday, but still used soda machines.
Gillie's owner Gillie Ranae said, "We started collecting it before it went, collected in buckets, then we just had to boil it. We're not furiously boiling it like we had been."
The dining halls on campus gave away bottled and canned drinks, from Evian to Dr Pepper. The dining services bought 50,000 drinks to give to students, director Rick Johnson said. "We could've sold them," he said, but they felt students deserved a consolation prize for the hassles with water in the dorms.
Dorms only lost water for a few hours, though upper floors had low pressure for a longer period. The water on campus continues to be undrinkable.
The need to boil cooking water continues to disrupt the cafeterias. Johnson said, "We're just trying to be as safe and as cautious as we could."
by CNB