Severe Weather Turns Eastern Roads Deadly

At first, Pattianne Gibson couldn’t see anything when a sudden snowstorm shrouded her minivan. Then she saw cars slamming together and people leaping to help each other in the fiery pileup.

Survivors told of rescues amid tragedy after snow squalls and slick roads caused chain-reaction accidents on three Pennsylvania interstates Friday night, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens.

After starting the season with little or no snow, fierce winter storms have spread from Lake Superior to eastern Pennsylvania this week, causing whiteouts in Pennsylvania and burying much of northern Michigan and Buffalo, N.Y., under as much as 7 feet of snow.

National Guard troops were at work Saturday helping Buffalo dig out after a record-breaking five-day storm, and crews from nearby Rochester, N.Y., and Toronto also helped out.

The 83.5 inches of snow this month--82.3 inches since Monday--made it by far the snowiest month in Buffalo history. The old record was 68.4 inches in 1985.

The heavy snow has crushed roofs and immobilized the city’s nearly 300,000 residents.

A 75-mile stretch of the New York State Thruway, a major east-west highway, was opened Saturday for the first time since Thursday. Buffalo Niagara International Airport had reopened Friday evening.

Rep. Jack Quinn (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked President Bush to provide federal help for Buffalo. Schumer estimated snow removal costs at $5 million.

“The president has nicknames for everyone, and he calls me the big man from Buffalo,” Quinn said. “I’m 6-foot-5, and I’m going to tell him the snow is over the big man’s head.”

Heavy snow, wind and cold turned highways to ice and blinded drivers in central Pennsylvania, causing several crashes Friday, including the fiery 51-vehicle pileup on Interstate 80 near Loganton. Six people were killed.

The interstate, one of the busiest east-west corridors in the country, was shut down in both directions.

A highway used as a detour was blocked by a series of minor accidents for part of Saturday morning, and police said several people suffered minor injuries.

Friday’s blinding weather came without warning.

“I was driving on the freeway and, all of a sudden, it was like somebody flipped a switch and it became a whiteout,” said Gibson, of Lakewood, Ohio, who escaped injury with her children, Kylie, 15, and Trent, 8. “You really couldn’t see five feet in front of you. You couldn’t see taillights.”

Her minivan slid into a tractor-trailer that jackknifed in front of her on I-80. She saw a tanker truck pile in, and car after car slammed in. “The cars kept coming--Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!” she said.

A woman got out of a car that wedged under the tanker and screamed that her children were still inside.

“I got in there, but I couldn’t get that baby,” said James Blake, of Tiffin, Ohio. “So I got my pocketknife and I went in again and I cut the straps on the car seat and we still couldn’t get him out, and then I had to just take him by the head and wiggle him until he came out.”

The crash involved a tanker carrying powdered iron, a highly flammable material used in chemical processing, state police said. Two trucks and 12 cars were destroyed by flames, police said.

Two more interstate pileups late Friday involving about 30 cars killed two people near Hazleton, Pa., Luzerne County’s Emergency Management Agency said.