By Stephen Smoot
Hardy County has borne “sturm und drang” as often as its fellow mountain counties, far more than most in other parts of West Virginia. All residents have seen storms that brought destructive high waters, mountains of snow, and destructive freezing rain, but few have seen anything like what happened two weekends ago.
The recipe for this storm included the typical ingredients of jet stream position and movement, cold air from the north, and moist air from the south.
It also included, as always, the near-unique Appalachian physical geography of lengthy ridges and valleys and their destabilizing effects on how air flows.
Add to that an unusually large amount of sleet, especially toward the higher elevations, and several counties in West Virginia found themselves in contention with frozen precipitation that flowed, in many cases, like water.
Sleet forms when snow generates in the icy clouds of the higher reaches of the cloud formation. Usually the air between there and the ground remains relatively the same temperature, but not this time. A layer of warm air embedded itself between higher and lower banks of very cold air. The warm layer melted the snow into water, where it reformed as raindrops. When teh rain hit the “supercooled,” as the National Weather Service described it, air beneath, the rain refroze and round droplets of ice.
Though sleet gets confused at times with frozen rain, it is not the same. Freezing rain is liquid until it hits a surface cold enough to refreeze it on contact. Normally sleet causes somewhat fewer problems, but not on this occasion.
Local offices of emergency management in the mountain counties joined residents in sharing the impact of sleet on the area. In regions with steep hillsides ending in both primary and secondary roads, thick banks of sleet rapidly accumulated. From a distance, it may resemble snow. Snowflakes, however, have extending crystalline arms that bond to each other. Sleet is trillions of tiny, near-spherical objects, with hard and icy surfaces.
Throughout the mountains, sleet avalanches raced down hills at deceptively fast speeds and piled into roadways. Much more dense and heavy than snow, authorities had to call upon limited numbers of pieces of heavy equipment to push and haul the ice away. Smoke Hole Canyon in Pendleton and Grant counties found its main access road buried under 15 or more feet of precipitation in some areas.
In Rockingham County, snow and ice caved in a number of poultry and greenhouses, prompting a quick response by local officials and others there.
After declarations by West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey, President Donald Trump announced that “federal disaster assistance is available to the state of West Virginia to supplement response efforts due to emergency conditions resulting fro a severe winter storm beginning on January 23.”
The notice came on Jan 24.
