Winter makes strong first impressions

A winter storm dumped 9 inches of snow on the Cape Girardeau area Wednesday, forcing schools and some businesses to close and making travel difficult.

Most people still hadn't shoveled out from the season's first snowstorm before a second storm hit the area Wednesday night.

Another 6 inches of snow was forecast to fall throughout much of Southeast Missouri Wednesday night.

"We're going to have a white Christmas -- if we can move," said Dan Spaeth, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Paducah, Ky.

Near-blizzard conditions were expected as temperatures were forecast to dip to a frigid 10 to 12 degrees Wednesday night. With the wind blowing at 15 to 20 mph, the wind chill was expected to be as much as minus 10 degrees.

And it won't be much warmer today with high temperatures around 15 degrees, the weather service reported.

Earlier on Wednesday, 5 inches of snow were reported in Perry County. Bollinger County received about 6 1/2 inches of snow.

"The heaviest band of snow kind of got going right at Cape Girardeau and extended all the way across Southern Illinois," Spaeth said.

Police and state troopers in Southeast Missouri responded to several accidents caused by vehicles sliding off slippery streets and highways. A Cape Girardeau fire truck slid off an icy Kage Road and had to be rescued by a tow truck. Fire department officials said no one was injured in the accident.

"It is still very dangerous," said police Sgt. Jack Wimp.

State highway patrol officers kept busy responding to accidents.

"In this kind of weather, we don't have enough officers to respond to everyone who slides off the road," said patrol dispatcher Timothy Meyer of Poplar Bluff.

At his home near Fruitland, Charlie Griffith watched the storm smack hard late Tuesday night.

"It came down real heavy, like rain. It didn't take but five or 10 minutes and the ground was white," said Griffith, deputy chief of the county's emergency operations office. "It came in like a lion."

Said Griffith, "Roads around here are slick, iced over.

"Road crews are trying to do the best they can but they are fighting a losing battle," he said.

Still plowing roads

State and local highway crews started plowing roads late Tuesday night and were still hard at work at the task late Wednesday.

Several snowplow trucks ran off the roads in the early hours Wednesday. "It was snowing so hard and so fast, it was hard to know where the road was," said Cape Girardeau Public Works director Tim Gramling. "We got off into a couple of ditches."

City crews plowed major city streets more than once. "We were basically just kind of treading water," Gramling said.

About 40 public works employees, spread over two shifts, battled the snow.

City crews planned to work through the night Wednesday and into Thursday morning.

Gramling said travel could be even more difficult today on snow-packed, icy streets. "It is going to freeze hard," he said.

In Jackson, road crews started clearing city streets about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. Twelve hours later, they were still "plugging away," said Jackson street superintendent Steve Hendrix.

"We're about half done and waiting for the other half to get here," he said. "We're trying to get into the subdivisions now."

Thirteen people drove snow plows for the city.

The sheer volume of snow made it hard to keep even the major streets cleared, he said.

In rural Cape Girardeau County, about 20 county highway department workers plowed snow off the roads.

"For us, it's going slowly because of the depth of the snow and the drifting," said county highway superintendent Scott Bechtold.

County crews didn't get out on the roads until daybreak. The county maintains about 400 miles of roads.

"Because of the number of miles we have, we wouldn't have been able to get caught up with it anyway," he said. "We have narrow roads, and at night it's hard to see what you're doing and you can damage the road surface if you can't see what you're doing," he said.

Bechtold said some farmers had cleared off some county roads by the time road crews started plowing.

Shovels and sleds

Many area residents spent part of the day shoveling their driveways.

"I shoveled snow for an hour," said Cape Girardeau city clerk Gayle Conrad, who lives in Jackson but managed to get to work after clearing her driveway. "The drifts were really high," she said.

Along West End Boulevard, Benny Shell shoveled snow from his sidewalk.

He said it was tough work. "But I don't do it very long at a time," he said.

Shell said he couldn't remember it snowing this much since the blizzard of 1979, which dumped 24 inches of snow on the region.

Wednesday's snowfall was the most snow to hit the area on this date since 4 1/2 inches of snow blanketed the area in 1963 leaving snowdrifts as high as 10 inches, according to Southeast Missourian weather records.

A winter storm in Cape Girardeau County hasn't dropped this much snow since Feb. 15, 1993, when the area received 12 inches of snow, newspaper records show.

For children, this season's first snowstorm was a welcome Christmas present.

Nathan Meystedt, 10, and his cousin, Kali Essner, 10, spent the morning riding a snowboard down Essner's driveway near Capaha Park.

"I was happy to see the snow," Nathan said. "This is pretty deep."

Elias Ace Hardware in Cape Girardeau sold 100 sleds Tuesday to customers excited about the forecast of snow.

Some customers arrived before the store opened Wednesday morning so they could buy sleds and snow shovels, said Tammy Elias, the store's co-owner.

"We had a lot of calls for the old-fashioned Flexible Flyer," she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123

Southeast Missourian staff writers Scott Moyers and Bob Miller and The Associated Press contributed to this story.