By Stephen Smoot
A week ahead of time, warnings started to arise over the potential for a historic storm to strike West Virginia. National weather maps in the countdown to the storm showed the slow, lurching, movement of a massive surge of storm activity moving northeast out of Mexico, through Texas and the middle South into Tennessee.
West Virginia was the bullseye it seemed to push toward. The entire state braced for what it expected would produce over one, to perhaps more than one foot. Some warnings even told the far Eastern Panhandle counties of Berkeley and Jefferson to prepare for two feet.
Then the storm brought its fury to the Mountain State, but not in the way most expected.
“We have been out every day,” said Tori Drainer, Shinnston City Manager, last week. “It’s been tough when you think of how bad the storm really got in the state.
She pointed out the difference between this and typical West Virginia winter storms, saying “it’s about fifty-fifty snow and ice.” Drainer added that “the first day we got a lot of ice, then snow on top of snow.”
The ice came in the form of sleet, which normally does not appear during the bitterly cold temperatures that came with the storm.
Sleet differs from freezing rain. The latter falls as rain from the sky, then freezes on contact with surfaces at certain temperatures. Sleet happens when snow originates in high atmosphere cloud formations, melts as it falls through a layer of air warmer than 32 degrees F, then falls through another subfreezing layer of air.
Droplets of water refreeze into tiny ice spheres and stay as such until they accumulate on the ground like snow. In mountain counties, enough accumulated on mountainsides that large banks of sleet and snow surged downward into roadways, blocking them with dense ice. Graders stepped in where snow plows could not.
In some cases, vital roads were cleared by equipment in use since the presidency of Richard Nixon, but not Shinnston.
“We prepared a month in advance” for winter,” shared Drainer. Shinnston stocked up on supplies needed when storms hit. Furthermore, the City Manager stated that “we have really good equipment. We replace our old equipment regularly.” Back hoes and other heavy equipment worked on areas in the City’s purview.
“The amount of snow has been crazy,” Drainer noted, “people were surprised.” But as she explained, when the weather gets crazy, Shinnston is prepared.
