At least 56,000 in East Tenn. and Southwest Va. without power

What may be the region’s heaviest snowfall in 14 years left at least 56,000 homes in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee without power, and kept police officers and utility providers scrambling to clear roadways and restore service.
Many drivers abandoned their vehicles on roadways, some blocking traffic, in snow drifts up to a foot deep.
Localities like Scott County – whose higher elevations received 16 inches of snow – set up shelters for people without power, and Dickenson County sheriff’s deputies fanned out to conduct welfare checks.
The severe weather, which started Friday afternoon, crippled the ability of Appalachian Power to repair its own infrastructure.
“We’re just now at the point where we’re actually able to move,” Todd Burns, a spokesman for the power company, said Saturday night. “A lot of the roads were simply impassable. We really weren’t able to get out and assess the damage because we couldn’t be mobile.”
Some of the hardest hit areas may be without power until midnight next Friday, Christmas Day, Burns said.
“We’ve got literally hundreds of power company employees working on this at this point. We’ve got either on the ground or en route to us an additional 800 contract line workers, from as far away as Georgia and Indiana,” Burns said, adding with a hint of understatement, “This is certainly a major event for us.”
In some of the worst-affected areas, the weather and the outages translated almost to panic.
“We’ve got road blockages, power outages just about countywide, no phone services, trees down,” said a harried-sounding police dispatcher in Dickenson County. “Deputies are reporting that road conditions are extremely bad. I’ve got to go. Our phones are ringing, ringing, ringing.”
About 85 percent of Appalachian Power subscribers in Dickenson County were without power Saturday night.
On the Tennessee side, a dispatcher in Sullivan County said that more than 200 trees had fallen across roadways, many of them downing power lines. The county’s residential areas were pocked with dark, powerless pockets comprising more than 14,000 homes, according to Appalachian Power.
“It’s just a mess out there,” said Patricia Macavin, a Bristol, Va., dispatcher.
On her way to work, Macavin saw about 10 cars abandoned on the side of Lee Highway. Several were still there by the afternoon.
Some, like Susan Wolfe, were retrieving their ditched vehicles.
Wolfe, a librarian at the Bristol Public Library, left work at 5 p.m. Friday and made it most of the way home. But as she crept along with the traffic on Meadowcrest Drive, “I lost momentum going up the hill, and I couldn’t make it to the top,” she said Saturday. She walked at least a mile through the snow to her home.
On Saturday, Wolfe and her husband successfully dislodged her Dodge Neon from a snowdrift. The couple has lived in Bristol since 1989, and Wolfe was unsure of the last time she had seen so much snow on the ground.
The answer is Feb. 2, 1996, when the snow at Tri-Cities Regional Airport measured 9.3 inches, said National Weather Service Meterologist Tim Doyle. Before then, a March 1993 storm dumped 11.4 inches of snow at the airport.
Friday night, the snow at the airport stood 7 inches deep. The amount varied significantly across the region, with Wise County, Va., getting a blanket of between 10 and 15 inches, and low-lying areas in Washington County, Tenn., getting a comparatively light dose of 4-6 inches, Doyle said.
Snow continued to fall Saturday evening and was expected to add another 2 inches to what was on the ground, before tapering off by this afternoon, Doyle said.
Law enforcement officers in the Twin City reported little activity. Some residents trudged gamely through the snowdrifts to grocery shop, while others built snowmen or took advantage of the weather to go sledding.
Elsewhere, the situation was more dire.
“We have widespread damage all over the county,” said Kathie Noe, a police spokeswoman for Scott County. “There are a lot of trees down over roadways.”
Before she reported to work, Noe called her utility provider and was told that her power might not be restored until midnight after today. When she arrived at work, she learned that an estimated 7,500 people were in the same position, without power, and uncertain of when it would be back.

dgilbert@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2558