Snowstorm Strands Thousands

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 24, 2000 / 8:29 AM EST / CBS

The powerful winter storm is gone, but thousands of people along the East Coast were going nowhere fast Wednesday, including hundreds still stuck in their tracks, bumper to bumper, on a snow-bound North Carolina highway. Thousands more passengers were stuck in airports due to flight cancellations.

The first big snowstorm of the year left North Carolina's I-85 looking more like a rest stop than a roadway, reports CBS News Correspondent Maureen Maher. The surprise blizzard stranded hundreds of drivers when the snow started falling Tuesday night and kept falling, leaving a record 22 inches in Raleigh-Durham.

"It just got thicker and thicker and then when I finally got down here, I said, well it's too risky to go through Durham, and I decided, well it's time to put a halt to it," said truck driver Bob Blanchard.

Uninformed and unprepared, road and utility crews could not keep up. Wednesday night, tens of thousands of area residents remain without power.

"We're using kerosene heaters, you know, but you can't cook. It's rough," said resident Theresa Scott.

This is the fourth time this season Mother Nature has dumped snow on North Carolina, further burying a state that rarely even sees enough snow to stick to the ground.

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Meanwhile, many marooned travelers remained at major airports across the East. Airlines canceled about a quarter of Wednesday flights to Washington's Ronald Reagan National Airport, which reopened after having been closed all day Tuesday.

Over 200 travelers spent the night at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, which was operating only one of four runways early Wednesday, leading to long delays.

"There is quite a crowd down there right now," said Betsey Sanpere, a spokeswoman for BWI, where strong winds remained a problem on Wednesday after 15 inches of snow Tuesday.

At Boston's Logan Airport, 67 flights had been canceled by mid-day Wednesday, a spokesman said.

The Raleigh-Durham International Airport was not expected to reopen before Thursday. Hundreds of passengers were stranded at the airport that was shrouded under a record 18.2 inches of snow. The previous record of 17.8 inches in a single day was set in Raleigh-Durham on March 2, 1927.

North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt was forced to declare a state of emergency.

Hunt told CBS News he was mainly concerned with restoring people's electricity and clearing the roads.

"We're going to get out there today and do as much as we can to try to clear the roads, but we still have the problem of trying to reacpeople," Hunt said. "We've got elderly people, people who are confined and sick and we have to make that our first priority."

Schools, governments and businesses were still closed across the East, and at least 150,000 people were without power. Many schools and offices in the Mid-Atlantic States were still closed while officials tried to clear the roads. In Washington D.C. the executive branch of government was closed for a second consecutive day.

The storm dumped as much as two feet of snow in some places and left at least four people dead. Slick highways caused a number of deaths, including a woman in New York State who died when her car hit a snowplow. In Massachusetts, a 5-year-old girl slipped into the icy Housatonic River while walking to school in the snow Tuesday and was feared dead.

One person was killed in a weather-related traffic accident on Monday night in North Carolina's Johnston County. A South Carolina emergency spokesman said three storm-related deaths were reported, including an 85-year-old woman who wandered out of her house and was found dead in the snow Tuesday.