BECKLEY, WV (WOAY)- “Well, mother nature pretty well threw the kitchen sink at us last night,” said Jimmy Wriston, WVDOT Secretary.
Winter Storm Blair has been barreling through the country, bringing lots of snow and ice to the region. While the wet snow can bring some wintery fun, like a good old snowball fight, it makes the roads very slick and dangerous to drive on, which can put a dent in your travel plans.
Atlanta locals were on their way home when their plans were disrupted by Blair.
“We got to Charleston, West Virginia, and the roads were totally impassable. So we had to stop, get a hotel,” said Sarah Servinski, a traveler heading back to Atlanta. “So we got on the road at two in Pittsburgh and by about four, it was pretty rough. We stopped I think about six or seven. We are only going about 25 miles per hour. So it was pretty rough and you could not see the road at all. There was almost no one on the road that we were traveling on and probably three or four different cars in ditches. That’s when we decided to stop.”
The WV Department of Transportation has been non-stop on the roads plowing and treating them through all the weather we’ve seen.
“We’ve seen some temperatures up and down a little bit, hovering above and below the freezing mark, just on and off all night. We’ve seen snow. We’ve seen rain. We’ve seen winds. We’ve seen some downed trees. We’ve seen some downed limbs,” explained Wriston. “We’ve been plowing. We actually got a lot of pre-treating done ahead of time and a lot of areas. So that’s helped us a bunch. But our crews really done a great job all night. We’ve had incidences and we’ve had challenges. We always do, but that’s the human element out there in the roadways, you know? A tractor-trailer can jackknife or somebody who doesn’t pay attention tries to take a turn too little too fast. Things happen,but for the most part, I think your Department of Transportation really nailed it.”
Even those just passing through could see the amount of personnel on the roads.
“We saw a lot of emergency vehicles like hydro trucks and lift trucks and for tree cutting and stuff. We’ve seen a lot of those trucks on the road driving in tandem, coming across. So they’re going somewhere to help somebody,” said Anita Naglie, a traveler heading back to Canada.
It takes more than just the snow plowers in a state of emergency for severe weather such as this.
“Communicating with our national guard partners, communicating with first responders and fire trucks and even tow trucks,” said Wriston. “That’s critical on our interstates to make sure that we have tow trucks position so that when we do have an incident, we can get in there, get a disabled vehicle out of the way so that we can get plowed.”
