A winter storm that barreled into West Virginia dropped snow and ice across the state, making travel treacherous and knocking out power to thousands of residents in southern counties.
“Mother nature pretty well threw the kitchen sink at us last night,” state Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston said.
Forecasters predicted another wave of one to three inches of accumulation in the hours ahead and extremely cold temperatures at midweek.
“There’s a low behind this system that’s going to ride right behind it — wrap around; we’re going to get colder air injection and all the rain or whatever wintry mix precipitation that we have leftover is going to pretty much turn into all snow from west to east,” said National Weather Service meteorologist James Zvolensky.
Then, Zvolensky told MetroNews, “We’re going to get really cold Wednesday night, Thursday night, even Friday night — down to single digits most of the areas.”
As of 9 a.m., Appalachian Power reported outages to43,000 West Virginia customers. The power company described complications from heavy accumulations of ice and snow coupled with low temperatures that can bring down utility poles, trees and limbs, resulting in a multi-day restoration event.
The power company also said extreme cold temperatures can cause line overload problems when trying to restore a large number of customers.
“In many cases, we must restore large outages in smaller groups, letting the electric load settle before restoring additional customers. Customers with outages can assist by turning off large electric users, such as heaters and water heaters until 15 or more minutes after power has been restored,” according to the power company.
Aside from emergency services, government activities were canceled everywhere. For example, legislative interim meetings that were supposed to start today were backed up until Tuesday. And Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin’s State of the City address that had been set for tonight was instead put off until Thursday.
“We keep our eye to the sky,” Goodwin said on “The Dave Allen Show” on WCHS Radio. “We’ve got 17 salt trucks that have been working around the clock. When I say around the clock, I mean around the clock.”
Goodwin continued by saying, “We planned for this, but it’s Mother Nature and we live in Appalachia. So snow is always an issue, but it is the ice that snarls traffic and causes most of our accidents and the power outages that you see.
“We are getting ready for another system to come through.”
City of Charleston Public Works Director Brent Webster described “incredible challenges” because of the weather that has already hit.
“Last night was a pretty incredible snowstorm, and then of course it did exactly what was forecast: it turned over to ice around 10 or 11 p.m. and then it ran through early this morning and that has created some incredible challenges above and beyond just salting and plowing,” Webster told MetroNews.
“Now we have a lot of trees that went down. Many of them we’re clearing, but that’s taken away from our salting and plowing. Many others are in power lines, and of course AEP is a great partner, but of course we can’t work on downed, live lines.”
Webster continued, “It’s going to be a slow process. We’ve got more snow coming, I think one to three inches. It’s a bigger snowstorm than we’ve had for a while.”
