The Shadow
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) – West Virginia officials say rapid snowfall, a downed radio tower and hemmed-in sections of the state turnpike all contributed to the hours-long stranding of hundreds of motorists over the weekend.
Gov. Joe Manchin and several agency chiefs spoke Tuesday on the state’s handling of the traffic mess caused by the winter storm.
Manchin said he remains frustrated with some of the response, but stopped short of assigning any blame. His officials instead proposed several possible ways to avoid a repeat of the episode. Those include installing gates in sections of the 88-mile toll road where concrete barriers had blocked stuck motorists from escaping.
American Power customers in the Madison, Logan, Williamson and Welch areas, meanwhile, can expect to remain without electricity until after Christmas. Utility President Dana Waldo told reporters at Manchin’s Capitol news conference that while power has been restored to 83,000 customers since Saturday, another 73,000 remained in the dark Tuesday.
The weekend storm dumped more than a foot of snow across the East Coast. Department of Transportation spokesman Brent Walker said the storm’s pace soon overtook Friday’s efforts to treat and pretreat roads. Several tractor-trailers jackknifed on a southbound section of the turnpike between Chelyan and Beckley. That trapped hundreds of vehicles, and sent a number of them into each other and off the road.
“It was an epic storm, and the jackknifing really started that chain reaction,” Walker told reporters Tuesday.
Manchin was among those critical after the turnpike remained opened until Saturday afternoon. General Manager Greg Barr of the West Virginia Parkways Authority, which runs the roadway, said his agency began routing traffic away from that southbound stretch Friday evening.
Citing the quick succession of wrecks, Barr said a message board told motorists in those lanes to exit at Chelyan. But as tractor trailers ran out of places to idle, they and other vehicles began returning to the roadway, Barr said.
Barr also faulted a key radio tower that failed around 8 p.m. Friday. That cut turnpike crews off from each other and the State Police, leaving them to rely on cell phones.
Barr said the authority decided to keep the northbound lanes open until mid-Saturday because its traffic continued to move despite the bad weather.
Barr, Manchin, Walker and others singled out those sections of the turnpike that pass through a narrow valley, and where continuous concrete barriers separate the opposing lanes. The absence of turnaround points in these areas were also blamed after an August 2008 accident along that stretch left motorists trapped for 10 hours.
“It creates a tunnel, for all intent and purpose,” the governor said.
Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox said the state hopes to replace several sections of barrier with gates. Additional message boards and cameras could also help, he said.
“It’s become obvious, we have to look at ways that give us more flexibility” in those sections, Mattox said.
Manchin had declared a state of emergency Saturday, which he lifted Tuesday for West Virginia’s 26 northern counties. More than 450 National Guard troops remain on duty Tuesday in the snowbound southern counties, where the state of emergency was still in effect, Adjutant General Alan Tackett said. They are in the field along with more than 1,900 American Power workers, some from as far away as Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, Waldo said.
Waldo said storm-felled trees smashed into conductors, which then pulled down their attached lines. He estimated that helped topple than 500 power poles across the state.
“It is an extreme amount of damage that we’re facing,” Waldo said.
Thieves are apparently complicating the problem by stealing downed conductors. Waldo cited reports of that in the southern counties. He said the utility hoped to end a majority of the ongoing outages on Christmas Eve, freeing up work crews to focus increasingly on those remaining areas without power.
