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Tag: snowstorm
Twelve Killed, Four Missing In Everest Avalanche

Twelve Killed, Four Missing In Everest Avalanche

By Pratibha Tuladar, McClatchy Tribune News Service

KATMANDU, Nepal — Authorities called off the rescue operation for survivors after 12 Nepali climbing guides were killed in an avalanche on Mount Everest Friday, as bad weather closed in.

The Tourism Ministry said the search would resume Saturday for four climbers who were still missing.

Seven climbers were rescued, including two airlifted to Katmandu for treatment.

The avalanche hit at a site known as the Khumbu icefall at more than 5,000 meters altitude, as the climbers were ascending from the base camp to camp one.

Before the climbing season beings in May, the guides go ahead to set up tents and lay up food and other equipment for climbers.

The guides were employees from five different trekking companies.

Concerns have been high recently over the number of tourists on the mountains, in particular after the government this year slashed mountaineering fees.

In 1996, eight climbers were killed on Everest in a snowstorm. More than 4,000 people have reached the summit of the the mountain since the first ascent in 1953 and more than 400 have died trying.

AFP Photo/Tshering Sherpa

Heavy Snow After Dry Weeks Unleashes Avalanche Fury In West

Heavy Snow After Dry Weeks Unleashes Avalanche Fury In West

By Craig Welch, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — More than 24 hours after a 1,000-foot-long avalanche killed two in their party, a pair of severely injured backcountry skiers from Washington were plucked from the slopes of the Wallowas in Eastern Oregon on Wednesday.

During a frustrating, snowy day with low visibility, volunteers on snowmobiles, rescue crews on skis and in a Sno-Cat, and National Guard troops in helicopters struggled most of the day to figure out how to get the victims out of the backcountry and to a hospital.

After an unusually dry winter in much of the West, that same heavy snowfall is making for ever more treacherous conditions just as a holiday weekend approaches and outdoor enthusiasts finally see fresh powder piling up in the mountains.

“We’re definitely worried about the next few days,” said Scott Schell, program director for the Northwest Avalanche Center in Seattle. “We’ve got really dangerous conditions out there right now.”

In Colorado, Utah and Oregon, six people died in avalanches in five days. A father and son were injured Tuesday in a smaller slide just outside the ski area at Stevens Pass.

The Northwest Avalanche Center has issued a “range-wide” high avalanche warning throughout the Cascades in Washington and expects it could remain in place through the weekend. Even as the center’s experts have been out testing conditions, they’ve triggered small slides in normally mellow terrain.

“We have very atypical conditions right now,” Schell said. “There are a handful of weak layers that lie within the snowpack that were developed in this dry high pressure. And we’re getting a ton of new snow on top of that, which is kind of a recipe for avalanches.”

While snow conditions are vastly different between the arid cold Rockies and the moist Cascades, many places across the West are seeing similar high risks, with tons of fresh snow piling on top of weak layers. Some resorts in Colorado have seen 5 or 6 feet or more of new snow in just four days.

“We’d had a lot of snow come down over the weekend and another 8 inches fell while they were out there,” since the accident, Baker County Undersheriff Warren Thompson said of conditions in the Wallowa Mountains.

Details of precisely what happened during Tuesday’s deadly avalanche in northeast Oregon are still unclear.

But the Sheriff’s Office and the Wallowa Avalanche Center said a party of eight skiers, including two guides from Wallowa Alpine Huts in Joseph, Ore., were on a multiday backcountry skiing trip. The entire group was from Washington, and all were experienced skiers.

The Sheriff’s Office said the group was also experienced at digging test pits and evaluating avalanche terrain.

The slide hit near Little Eagle Creek, near Cornucopia Mountain in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, about noon Tuesday. Thompson said the fracture occurred above the skiers and above the 7,200-foot level, carrying snow about a fifth of a mile.

One of the guides and a client, from Seattle, were killed. A woman suffered two broken legs and a shoulder injury, while another man fractured his femur. Authorities have not yet released the victims’ names.

Thompson told The Associated Press that the injured woman was from Wenatchee and the man was from Snohomish. The rest of the visiting skiers were from Seattle.

Attempts to rescue the injured using helicopters piloted by National Guard troops from Idaho and Oregon failed Tuesday and again Wednesday as visibility worsened.

Instead, the victims were eventually packed into sleds and brought down the slope with ropes before being towed out of the area behind a Sno-Cat and snowmobile.

As darkness descended Wednesday, plans to have the victims airlifted to hospitals had to be abandoned. Authorities instead were planning to have ambulances meet the sleds in Halfway, Ore., and drive the injured to Richland, where they would be flown to a Boise, Idaho, hospital.

It’s not clear precisely what conditions were like in the area of the slide. But the Wallowa Avalanche Center late last week described conditions similar to those elsewhere in the West: Piles of new snow were not bonding well to the old surface.

Similar conditions in Colorado led to a slide that buried snowmobilers near Crested Butte on Sunday, killing one of them. Another avalanche caught two skiers who were outside the controlled areas at Keystone the same day. One of the skiers died.

The day before, another snowmobiler was killed in Utah, and the day before that, an avalanche buried and killed a Utah snowshoer.

With more and more people traveling in the backcountry, experts say it’s more important than ever that snow enthusiasts understand how much is not in their control while in the wild.

Dale Remsberg, the technical director of the American Mountain Guides Association in Colorado, who helps train guides, said there is no way to eliminate all risk.

Even when traveling with an experienced guide, clients need to understand avalanche and mountain safety and be able to evaluate the risks for themselves.

“One of the key things from the start when we teach guides is to make sure they teach their clients that there is no such thing as safe in an inherently risky environment,” Remsberg said. “There’s only so much you can do to control the forces at play in these environments.”

AFP Photo/Don Emmert

Nine Die, Power Outages Spread As ‘Paralyzing’ Storm Engulfs South

Nine Die, Power Outages Spread As ‘Paralyzing’ Storm Engulfs South

By David Zucchino and Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times

DURHAM, N.C. — Much of the South found itself in the nastiness of a winter storm Wednesday, with needle-like freezing rain, growing piles of snow and biting temperatures that turned roads into a slippery mess, cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people and grounded thousands of flights.

The storm, which spread from Texas to the Carolinas, was described in near-apocalyptic terms by the National Weather Service, which labeled the weather “an event of historical proportions.” The service went on to use terms such as “catastrophic,” “crippling” and “paralyzing” in describing the potential hazards.

By afternoon, much of the Deep South was caked in a dangerous armor of glistening ice and snow. At least nine highway deaths were reported and more than 350,000 customers were without electricity in Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana — and the outages were expected to grow. Some customers could be in the dark for days despite feverish efforts to bring the region’s power back on line.

In North Carolina, sections of five major interstate highways were gridlocked and motorists were abandoning their cars — scenes that appeared to repeat the traffic debacle that gripped Atlanta two weeks ago when thousands of vehicles were left on snow-slick roads.

As the situation worsened into the evening, officials warned drivers to stay with their cars or the vehicles would be towed at their expense. Authorities said abandoned vehicles were blocking snow plows and emergency crews, and people trying to walk home were at risk of being hit by cars sliding off icy roads.

Traffic cameras showed vehicles backed up for miles, with cars stacked on roadsides and people stomping through the snow. The Twitter feed for the state transportation department was crammed with warnings of gridlock from Interstate 26 in the west to Interstates 95, 85, 40 and 77 in central and eastern North Carolina.

Schools and many businesses were closed, but commuters leaving work at midday to beat the storm clogged roads leading out of Charlotte and Raleigh. The weather paralyzed major urban areas in Charlotte, the Triangle area of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and the Triad area of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point.

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory had warned his fellow Tar Heels to stay at home. “Don’t put your stupid hat on” and challenge icy highways, the Republican said Tuesday night. He anticipated “one of the toughest storms we’re going to see in our history.”

Up to 10 inches of snow was predicted for the western mountains of North Carolina, 7 inches for Charlotte and 2 to 4 inches for Raleigh.

The North Carolina State Highway Patrol was inundated by calls for help from motorists trapped on jammed highways, marooned after cars slid into ditches or got stuck on the roadside after rear-end collisions.

“We have bumper-to-bumper traffic in some places and gridlock in others,” 1st Sgt. Jeff Gordon of the highway patrol said.

“We’re telling people, please, if you’re inside, stay there. Don’t go out on the roadways,” Gordon said. “Just have a look at some of the traffic cameras.”

In South Carolina, GOP Gov. Nikki Haley asked President Barack Obama to declare the state a federal disaster area.

“The numbers and conditions look like it’s going to be worse than the storm of 2004,” Haley told reporters, referring to a storm that knocked out power for 250,000 people and coated power lines with three-quarters of an inch of ice.

The storm is far from spent. It headed northward throughout the day, and was expected to bring from 6 inches to more than a foot of snow Thursday as it moves through Washington, D.C., the New York metropolitan area and into New England by the end of the week.

Still, the miserable weather was a chance for Good Samaritans to do their deeds.

One such do-gooder was Roberto, said Glenda Keenan, who was rescued by the stranger. He told her he was a second-year medical student at the University of North Carolina. And he insisted on helping her after she was marooned on a snowy roadside outside Chapel Hill on Wednesday afternoon.

“He was so sweet — he was determined to deliver this old lady from the side of the road to her lair,” Keenan, who is 60-something, said after Roberto had braved icy roads to drive her home. She did not get his full name.
Keenan said she was on her way home from a vinegar and olive oil store she owns when she was forced to stop her Ford Focus in clogged traffic. She couldn’t get the car moving again on the ice-slicked road, even after two people tried to push her.

The car was eventually pushed safely to the side of the road, and Keenan decided to walk the two to three miles home — leaving in her trunk the groceries she had just bought to get her through the storm.

A couple in a passing car offered her a ride, but she told them not to stop because they’d get stuck too. Then Roberto pulled up in a sedan and insisted that she ride home with him.

Roberto was worried about his wife, who was enduring her own icy adventure on her drive home, but he drove past his own neighborhood and delivered Keenan to her front door.

“I get so demoralized by the horrible things going on in the world, so it was touching to see a complete stranger so concerned about helping someone in trouble,” she said.

AFP Photo/Emmanuel Dunand

‘Snowmaggedon’ Takes Aim At Winter-Weary U.S. East

‘Snowmaggedon’ Takes Aim At Winter-Weary U.S. East

Washington (AFP) – A major storm blowing in heavy snow and ice gripped large swaths of the winter-weary United States early on Thursday, leaving a dozen people dead and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Thousands of travelers were stranded as flights, including at major air hubs in Atlanta and New York, were cancelled, and nearly 800,000 homes and businesses lost power, mainly in Georgia and North and South Carolina.

The latest brutal freeze to hammer the eastern states of the country since the start of the year has been dubbed “snowmaggedon,” “mind-boggling” and “historic” by major television networks and forecasters.

CNN put the overall death toll at at least 10. CBS News said that at least 11 deaths had been blamed on the ferocious conditions.

“A strengthening area of low pressure will move up the east coast on Thursday bringing with it significant winter weather from the southeast to New England (in the northeast),” said the National Weather Service, which had warned of a “mammoth dome” of Arctic air.

The massive storm — which had an estimated 100 million people in its path in 20 states — hit Wednesday and by Thursday the National Weather Service had warnings in effect in numerous states, advising people to stay off the “dangerous” roads.

Earlier, President Barack Obama had declared states of emergency in Georgia and South Carolina in order to deploy federal resources to help deal with the frigid storm.

Drivers defied repeated warnings not to travel, and accidents and abandoned cars caused massive traffic jams in North Carolina, with the usually temperate cities of Raleigh and Charlotte transformed into ice- and snow-covered parking lots.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory urged residents to stay indoors — even if meant sleeping at work — rather than risk the treacherous roads.

“If you’re in a safe warm place, stay in a safe warm place,” McCrory told CNN.

“We’ve already had two fatalities and we don’t want to see more.”

– Flights badly hit –

Speciality website FlightAware said airlines canceled at least 3,700 flights on Wednesday and had already shelved 4,500 for Thursday, including many flights to and from New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington.

The U.S. capital’s downtown was a virtual ghost town as snow blew in late on Wednesday night, with temperatures hovering around 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 C) but the bracing winds making it feel more like 15 degrees, forecasters said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it was in contact with state emergency offices in densely populated Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia to assess their assistance needs as the storm builds.

In addition to the FEMA aid, various localities across the region had readied emergency shelters at churches and recreation centers where residents could stay warm should they lose power.

The severe weather has also been playing havoc with U.S. businesses and governments’ bottom line.

Payrolls firm ADP said last week that the wintry onslaught has taken a toll on job growth.

Oil prices, by contrast, have been propelled higher by the extra-cold weather and succession of winter storms.

State and local governments are scrambling to cover the cost of clearing the snow, especially as road salt prices skyrocket amid shortages.

Farmers and rural residents are also facing high prices and shortages of the propane used to heat their homes and barns.

AFP Photo/Mladen Antonov