By Neil Offen
noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- Saturday's winter wonderland -- the result of half a dozen inches of snow followed by hours of sleet that socked the area -- could turn into a real nightmare today and Monday.
"The roads are going to become blocks of ice when the sun goes down," said meteorologist Jeff Orrock with the National Weather Service in Raleigh. "Even if things melt a little bit during the afternoon, and they won't melt much, everything is going to re-freeze again. The roads will be at their most dangerous after sunset."
The slow-moving storm -- which deposited varying amounts of wintry precipitation across the state -- let kids get out their sleds, but canceled almost all activity around the area, essentially shut down RDU International Airport, and prompted Gov. Beverly Perdue to declare a state of emergency.
It also made the roads extremely dangerous beginning Friday night, causing a flurry of accidents. By mid-day Saturday, state troopers had responded to 1,200 calls that included 800 collisions statewide, said Julia Jarema, a spokesman for the state emergency operations center. "The conditions are pretty treacherous and it's pretty much everywhere," Jarema said. "We've had reports from 96 of the 100 counties in the state.
But locally, it could have been much worse, said Durham Police Watch Commander J.E. Young. "Apparently, everybody is getting the news to stay off the road," Young said. "It's been very light out there, and we haven't had many reports."
Midday Saturday, Interstates 40 and 85 were seeing only a few cars and almost no trucks; major Durham thoroughfares like Fayetteville Street and Erwin Road were deserted and downtown Durham looked like a whitened ghost town.
Three diehard vendors manned the Durham Farmers' Market, which was open but largely deserted from 10 a.m. to noon.
It wasn't just the roads and the fact that the storm hit on Saturday keeping people at home, but the temperatures as well. The mercury today won't rise much above the mid-20s and overnight, the temperature should hover in the mid-teens. It could descend to the lower teens in the northern parts of Durham County.
With winds gusting to nearly 20 miles an hour, Orrock said tonight's wind chill could be between 0 and 3 degrees.
"It's going to be brutal," he said, "and very dangerous. With all the accumulation out there, the roads are going to be very tough -- much worse than they are on Saturday. And that's going to continue through Monday morning, until we get some real melting beginning around lunchtime."
Crews from the state, county and city were out all day Saturday, trying to make those roads passable.
The city had a 30-man crew working a 12-hour shift until noon Saturday and then brought in another 12-man crew to work a new 12-hour shift.
They operated 26 snow plows and spreaders on 22 different routes through the city.
Michael Balzarano Jr., the superintendent of Durham's street maintenance division, said main routes through the city weren't too bad.
"They are as good as they can be," Balzarano said as he got a snow plow ready at the public works operation center. "It's a Saturday, and that's good for us, because it means there are not a lot of people out there, and that helps us do our work."
The crews hadn't gotten to side roads yet, as of midday Saturday, but "we'll get to them," Balazarano said. "If not this time, then on the second round."
The equipment has operated well, he said, with only minor breakdowns, "and those were things we were able to fix quickly."
Locally, electrical power was working, too. Significant power outages were reported across the region: Duke Energy had 42,000 outages in its North Carolina and South Carolina service territory and Progress Energy, which had had about 50, 000 outages, had restored power to all but about 10,000 by Saturday evening. However, no outages were reported for the Triangle region.
"It's tough out there in the Triangle," the weather service's Orrock said. "But it's not as bad as it is in a lot of other places across the state."
