Help Is On The Way For Snowbound On Plains

Colorado launched a haylift Tuesday to try to save thousands of cattle stranded by 10-foot-high snowdrifts left after back-to-back blizzards paralyzed life on the Plains.

"These cattle have already gone a number of days without food and water. They're just going to lay over dead if we don't do something soon," said Department of Agriculture Executive Director Don Ament.

Last week's storm dumped as much three feet of snow on the already hard-hit mountains and plains, and state and municipal crews from the Rockies to the Oklahoma Panhandle to Nebraska were still digging out highways and trying to reach isolated homes on Tuesday.

The cleanup will be aided by the weather. "It'll be bright and sunny across the Rockies and snow-covered Plains and temperatures should make it into the 40s today and near 50 tomorrow, which will melt a good deal of that ice and snow," says CBS News meteorologist George Cullen.

Utility crews in four states struggled to restore electrical service to tens of thousands of homes and businesses that remained without power. Grocery store shelves went bare, and airplane crews searched highways and fields for stranded travelers — in some places using heat-sensing equipment to locate cattle.

The livestock situation was grave in Colorado as the state competed with Kansas to find enough helicopters capable of hauling hay bales that weigh up to 1,300 pounds, Ament said. He said many of the state's cargo helicopters are in the Middle East.

An aerial survey on New Year's Day turned up 100 sites where cattle had gathered, and the first flight of two small Huey helicopters took off Tuesday morning.

"We're looking for any remaining stranded motorists who may be in the area in need of assistance, and we're also looking for any stranded livestock or any stranded persons in some of the isolated ranches," First Lt. Steve Hamilton of the Civil Air Patrol told CBS Radio News on Monday.

The helicopter pilots headed for herds that had been mapped by spotter planes, said Capt. Robert Bell, a Guard spokesman. They had to deal with snow whipped up by their rotors, and searched for level, hard-packed spots to set down, but were more likely to be forced to simply drop the feed, he said.

What no one wants is a repeat of 1997, when a blizzard killed up to 30,000 farm animals and cost farmers and ranchers an estimated $28 million, said Polly White of the Colorado Division of Emergency Management.

Ice and heavy snow also bent over electrical towers and downed hundreds of miles of power lines. At least 60,000 homes and businesses in western Kansas, more than 15,000 in Nebraska, and 6,000-plus in Colorado and Oklahoma were without electricity, and some utility officials warned it could take more than a week to restore power.

Every motel in the western Nebraska town of Kearney was full with people who had no electricity at their homes, said a spokeswoman at the Kearney Ramada Inn.

"We know that customers are getting frustrated," said Beth Boesch, spokeswoman for the Nebraska Public Power District, which lost 600 miles of power lines. "We just ask people to be patient. The damage is very widespread, and it's going to take some time to put it back together."

In Oklahoma's Panhandle, National Guard troops and local authorities were going door to door at farms and ranches in isolated areas Tuesday, checking on residents who had been snowed in and without power for four days.

The snowbound Kansas town of Sharon Springs still had no clear way in or out for its 835 residents on Monday, but at least they didn't lose power, said Bill Hassett, manager of the town's power plant.

"We're snowed under," Hassett said. "We're just in the process of digging out. We had total 36 inches of snow. Thank God we kept the lights on."

The Colorado National Guard, which the governor activated twice in the span of a week because of the back-to-back blizzards, helped carry emergency supplies such as medicine and baby formula to isolated homes.

"I was complaining I wanted a white Christmas — and I got it," Days Inn staffer Ann in Lamar, Colo., told CBS Radio News. "I'm ready for spring."

"All you see is snowplows and bulldozers and dump trucks, and everybody just trying to get rid of the snow, trying to move it. There's so much of it, there's no place to put it," added Ann, who would not give her last name.

La Junta, Colo., resident Vern Giltner finally made it to the store.

"Ran out of eggs, ran out of bacon. That's why we're in town," Giltner told CBS affiliate KKTV.

At the Wooten family's ranch in canyon land along the Purgatorie River near the southeastern Colorado town of Kim, Steve Wooten and his uncle spent Monday checking on their cattle. They had moved most of the animals closer to the house, but had some that had not been fed since the latest storm hit on Thursday.

Still, after several years of drought, Joy Wooten said she was thankful for the moisture.

"It's kind of hard now," she said, "but you have to think of the green grass in the spring."