STUDENT CAUGHT IN BLIZZARD; STAY AT GRANDMA'S IS AN ADVENTURE

Amy Sharp's spring break from Southeast Missouri State University didn't turn out quite as she had hoped it would.

Sharp travelled with her 8-month-old daughter to visit her grandmother early last week in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., which is situated at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains. Everything was fine until the snow began to fall Friday.

"The snow started falling at about 6 p.m.," she said. "They only predicted a few inches, so we weren't really worried.

"It was thundering and lightning during the snow storm," she said. "I had never experienced anything like that before."

Television and radio reports predicted 2 to 3 inches of snow before nightfall and about 6 inches overnight. But she awoke to 23 inches of snow covering everything in sight.

"There were drifts that were up to my waist," Sharp said. "Everything else was at least up to my knees."

At about 2 a.m. Saturday the power went out. It did not come on again for three days. "It was so very cold," Sharp said.

With the electricity out, the only source of heat in the six-room house was an oil-burning stove in the living room. The two women shut the doors to the back bedrooms, hung sheets from the ceiling to trap the heat in the living-room-bathroom-bedroom area, and blocked off the door to the kitchen.

"It was about 40 degrees in the kitchen, and it was below freezing in the back bedrooms," Sharp said. "The stove kept the three rooms we were using pretty warm."

For three days, Sharp and her grandmother used the oil stove to cook, to warm water in which they could bathe the baby, and as their primary heat source.

"We cooked pancakes, hamburgers, bacon and eggs it was almost like using a real stove," Sharp said.

The two women were somewhat prepared to be snowed in for a few days.

"Right before it started to snow on Friday, we noticed that we were running out of cereal," Sharp said. "So we went down to the store to get that, and bought diapers, baby food, milk and other things we needed."

Sharp said that the store was so full of people on Friday that there were no shopping carts to be found. "I had to follow someone out to their car in the rain to get a shopping cart to use," she said.

When the power went out, Sharp and her grandmother turned on a battery-operated radio, which went dead a short time later. To solve the problem, Sharp said she took the battery out of the smoke detector to put into the radio.

"People who needed help would call into the radio station," Sharp said. "Then people in four-wheel drive vehicles or helicopters would come in and drop off supplies."

Sharp said she could hear the helicopters flying overhead that were carrying much-needed food, kerosene, batteries and blankets to people stranded at their homes.

At night, Sharp and her grandmother listened to the radio by the light of several candles and an oil-burning lamp.

"We went to bed a lot earlier not long after it got dark," she said. "The baby slept a lot, too.

"We sat around and talked a lot," Sharp said. "It was really kind of nice I guess we talked a lot more than we would have otherwise."

Sharp's parents were supposed to come and pick her up Friday to take her back to Cape Girardeau. But the bad weather and closed interstates kept them at bay in Nashville until Monday afternoon.

"When they finally got to grandma's house, we still didn't have power," Sharp said. "My dad barely got up the hill to the house."

Before departing for Cape Girardeau, Sharp's father shoveled a pathway from the front door to grandma's car and cleared some of the snow from the driveway.

Sharp missed Monday's and Tuesday's classes at Southeast Missouri State University, but said she was glad to finally be home.

"It was an experience I won't soon forget," Sharp said. "But I'm ready to go back to classes now."