Bracing for Son of Stormageddon

Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates watches a National Weather Service webinar today predicting the Son of Stormageddon to arrive Tuesday as the region digs out from a snowstorm disaster.

By Scott Beveridge

WASHINGTON, Pa. – The webinar today with emergency management folks from the tri-state area and the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh left everyone with a knot in their stomachs.

Another heavy snowstorm is approaching, one with the potential to cause a disaster worse than the one that followed “Stormageddon” on Friday and Saturday and left thousands of houses without heat and electricity.

The trees and many utility wires are still wrapped in thick ice and snow, and this new storm expected at 10 a.m. tomorrow will surely cause more, possibly worse destruction, Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates said this afternoon.

“I can’t even fathom where we are going with this,” Yates told the Observer-Reporter newspaper this morning.

Yates, who has had little sleep since Friday, actually buried his face in his hands at the news. I wanted to drop an F-bomb. An emergency management official chimed in and said, "That's a big-ass storm."

“Buckle up,” Weather Service Meteorologist Rich Kane said during his webinar presentation when he predicted 9 to 13 inches by Saturday “double barrel” storms. Within the hour, his forecast changed to the possibility of 10 to 14 inches of snow.

This could not have come at a worse time.

Twenty-five percent of the county is still without power from the last storm that dropped as many as 2 feet of snow in the region. Yates also confirmed my suspicion that the Mon Valley, where I live, suffered the brunt of the storm.

It looks as if a tornado ripped through there, as hundreds of large trees have been uprooted by the weight of the snow. One local fire chief said today it will take the rest of the year to clean up the damage.

The power has yet to be restored to my house, but a natural gas fireplace and heater have kept the temperature there about 58 degrees at night during single-digit temperatures. However, the water pipes are now frozen in the bathroom so I probably will be boiling water to clean up in the bathtub. Lights some candles. I’m feeling the ambience.

As for the cat that I rescued from a neighbor’s house last night; it quit shivering and crying and seemed, at last check, to be adjusting to its new digs. However, I am not in a rush to go home once more to a dark, chilly house, especially now having worries that tomorrow’s storm might keep it in the dark for days to come.

The snow-coated Donora-Webster Bridge five days after Stormageddon arrived in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Surviving Stormageddon Day 3

Cold and ignored in Westmoreland County

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – Allegheny Power, you are not entirely to blame for the power outage in this tiny village nestled among four municipalities with a combined population nearly 30,000 people.

We here in Webster, Pa., have long known that global positioning systems direct first-time visitors, inexperienced ambulance drivers and delivery trucks to nearby Donora, in place of our houses.

So here I offer the utility company a photograph of as many as 10 trees that were uprooted by "Stormageddon" after it began Friday night, pulling down the cable and electric wires. My brother remarked just two weeks ago that there was no excuse for these trees being ignored by the power company for so long because some of them were already leaning on those wires.

Meanwhile, I saw my first Allegheny Power repair truck today across the Monongahela River in Donora, a town that never lost its power to the heavy snow storm. It passed too quickly before I had a time to flag down its driver and direct him to tiny Webster with a population of fewer than 200 people.

Linemen, if you see this, the answer to our power outage can be found on Webster-Hollow Road. There are signs directing motorists to Webster from Route 51 in two locations in Rostraver Township.

By the way, can anyone tell me the identity of the emergency management director in wealthy Rostraver? To this date Sunday afternoon, no one has gone door-to-door in Webster to check on the elderly and sick, or to direct the neighborhood without heat to the nearest shelter for warmth and food. It's shameful.

Here I sit at Ringgold High School, near Monongahela, where senior citizens have been sheltering and raving about the local police and firemen for the wonderful job they have done to get them to safety. Thank you Monongahela.

UPDATE:



The situation facing the power company is much worse that it seemed before I ventured out of town this afternoon to Monongahela.

There are large trees down across utility wires along the entire 5-mile distance along routes 906 and 136 between Webster and that neighboring city. It will not be an easy task to remove them and restore power in the area.

Meanwhile, I passed a large convoy of line repair trucks tonight on Route 51 in West Mifflin heading south in the direction of Rostraver. The amount of houses without power in this area appears to be widespread along Route 201 in Rostraver and in Jefferson Hills, Allegheny County.

The natural gas heater and fireplace at my house had the indoor temperature at 68 degrees at last check. Others are not so lucky.

UPDATE No. 2:

As it happens, I have taken in the evacuated neighbor's overly-attentive cat until this mother of a storm has lifted and power returns to the neighborhood.

The candles are lit once more. Abbey has fresh cat liter, food and water, yet she still whines.

Outside, really the only way to describe it would be to say a hurricane swept through here Friday. The emergency folks are saying over there in Washington County it could be Friday until power is restored in some parts there. Here, in Westmoreland County, I am still in the dark and no one has said, to my knowledge, when rescuers will chop up the hundreds of trees that have fallen around here in order to return power to these parts.

Meanwhile, the cat is crying, seemingly afraid of its new digs. I want to tell her she should be so lucky to be warm once more as the temperature is dipping outside to 10 degrees.

To her credit, it is dark and scary tonight.

Surviving stormageddon online

Still without power 24 hours after a disastrous winter storm pummeled Pennsylvania, this photograph illustrates the challenges of bringing a Verizon cell phone signal to my house in the Monongahela River Valley.

I had to tape this fancy adapter with a mood light holding the broadband access device to the window in my front door at that exact location to stay connected. It's the only place in the house where the thing would work.

With all these candles in this room, I feel as if I am in a 1980s Sting music video. Meanwhile, the ironing board desk has no logical explanation, either.

Thank goodness I have some auxiliary heat in the form of a natural gas wall-mounted heater.

A hick town winter tradition

Under today's threat of a severe winter storm, once again the pickings are slim along the toilet paper isle at the local Giant Eagle supermarket outside of Washington, Pa.

The paranoid, frantically worried they will be shut in by the weather, also nearly wipe the supermarket shelves clean of eggs, milk and bread across southwestern Pennsylvania.

It's unfortunate for those who might actually need to go to the food store because they will stand in long lines as the snow falls, mostly behind old people with blue-tinged hair who apparently do not prefer the Northern Quilted brand.

This marching band looks fun, not mad

It would be cool in Pittsburgh, Pa., if someone there started up something similar to the March Madness Marching Band of Lexington, Ky. (video by Jennifer Miller)

A photographer's essays

An e-mail that ordinarily would have been dumped today into this blog's junk file surprisingly caught my attention and took me to a web site with some amazing work by Pittsburgh freelance photographer Ross Mantle.

The shot, above, especially made me look twice at his work. His expressions in words that accompany the images are similarly sensitive and intriguing.

Click here to find his portfolio.