800316 Articles and Notes

800316 Articles and Notes

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Miami Herald March 16, 1980
Brown Snow Shakes Up
Folks in Central Maine

AUGUSTA, Maine (UPI) — Snow falling in central Maine was dirty even before it touched the ground and no one seemed to know why.
The snow started turning yellow or orange-brown late Friday afternoon. Bewildered residents started putting calls through to the Bureau of Air Quality Control for answers.
Officials at the Department of Environmental Protection were just as confounded by the occurrence.
"We've taken samples and put them in the refrigerator for tests," said David Leake, the DEP's public information director. "Evidently, it ranges from a yellowish color to an orangey-brown color. We don't have any way of knowing what's causing it."
Leake urged residents everywhere in the state to write the agency if they notice discolored snow in their communities.
"We know it's happened in central Maine," said Leake. "But we want to know what kind of area this stuff fell over, for some idea of tracking this thing or what caused it."
He said the dirty snow should not be dangerous, or a health hazard, but was just a "scientific phenomenon."

Snow, Rain Plaster
Northeast, Big Cities
Miami Herald March 15, 1980
Associated Press
The season's "first real nor'easter" plastered the Northeast with up to a foot of snow Friday, shutting down schools, darkening homes and giving commuters fits in the slushy big cities.
At least four deaths were attributed to the storm which moved in late Thursday and spent the night unloading snow and freezing rain from Virginia to northern New England.
Snow was up to 13 inches deep in the mountains of New York and five inches deep in Manhattan. Maryland got about seven inches and depths across New England ranged from three to six inches, with up to a foot up to a foot of snow in some of the mountains.
TWO PEOPLE were killed on slick highways in New York, one in Maryland and one in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, flooding hit parts of South Carolina and northern Florida and residents of Ocean City, Md., were patching up damage from gale winds Thursday night that ripped the roofs off two beachfront motels and caused widespread beach erosion.
"I heard, like, trumpets going through my house," said Dennis Sesplankis, manager of the Gateway motel in Ocean City. "It was a weird experience. We lost about four rooms completely — torn off and blown away."
An earthen dam holding back a rain-swollen 100-acre lake near Fairfax, S.C., burst Friday morning, sending water five feet deep across U.S. 321 and knocking out two bridges and secondary roads. It sent a 50-foot wide stream of water across about six miles of woods and farmlands, washing away the foundation of one unoccupied house.
In the Virginia suburbs of Washington, freezing rain that turned to snow during the night toppled trees onto power lines, blacking out 15,000 homes.
BOSTON SCHOOL children got an extra holiday as the storm brought three inches of snow, plus rains that flooded parts of the Massachusetts Turnpike and Route 1.
"A lot of cars are getting washed out when they hit the water," said Massachusetts State Police Cpl. Paul Beloff.
Rush-hour traffic also was snarled in New York City, where the overnight snow turned to rain and hail and then back into snow. A multiple bus-car accident in the Lincoln Tunnel between Manhattan and New Jersey backed up traffic for miles.
On Long Island, police said many cars were disabled along the Long Island Expressway and the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway. One officer described it as "a mess, with cars all over the place."

Oregon
Tornado Injures 2

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) — A tornado ripped through a gymnasium roof Monday, destroyed six homes, leveled three buildings, cut off power and injured two persons.
Elam Carlton, superintendent at Oakland High School, said: "The roof was blown off part of the gymnasium, and there was scattered damage throughout the school. Many of the students were inside when it hit, but there were no emergency procedures under way because it hit without warning."

Note: Red Sweat &
Brown Snow.
March 20, 1980

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THE SUNDAY OREGONIAN, MARCH 23, 1980

Unseasonal storm batters Northeast; fi

By DAVID L. LANGFORD
Of The Associated Press

Newborn spring threw a tantrum Saturday, assaulting the Northeast with roof-ripping winds, heavy snows and driving rains that caused the worst floods in 25 years in some areas.

Communities were awash across New York and New England, where up to 9 inches of rain fell. Many bridges were gone, water was waist deep across some roads and highways. Hundreds of families abandoned their homes, others were isolated.

At least five persons were killed in weather-related accidents Friday and Saturday. They included a 26-year-old Maryland woman blown into the path of an oncoming car in the suburbs of Washington, where winds were clocked at more than 60 mph.

While gale-force winds pounded the Eastern states from Virginia to New England, 2 feet of snow were dumped in parts of western New York state near Buffalo and parts of northwestern New Jersey and Massachusetts got at least a foot.

"It looks like we've got kind of an isolated section of New Jersey that's getting clobbered," said Ben Scott, chief meteorologist at the weather service bureau at Newark International Airport. "Some places had 10 to 12 inches and it's still coming down."

Flooding caused the greatest problems in upstate New York.

"We've got people stranded all over the place," said Sheriff Thomas Mayone in Ulster County, N.Y., one of the regions under a state of emergency. "It's a heck of a mess."

The Town of Middleburgh in Schoharie County, Huntington, Mass., found their routes home blocked by water. While state police led some of them home in a convoy, 23 students and a dozen adults spent the night in the school. At 3 a.m. they were playing basketball in the gym.

Massachusetts police closed several stretches of U.S. 20 between West Springfield and the Berkshires hilltown of Becket.

Winds clocked at more than 60 mph Friday night at National Airport in Washington knocked out scores of windows in high-rise buildings in the Virginia suburbs of Arlington and Alexandria.

Falling trees damaged houses and brought down in several areas around Washington, and winds toppled some trucks on the highways.

Winds in the Newark, N.J., area lifted the entire roof from a bank and part of the roof of a department store.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms on Friday also caused flooding in Mississippi and Tennessee and at least 17 persons were injured when tornadoes touched down in Alabama and Georgia.

In New York, the giant twin towers of the World Trade Center swayed in 50 mph winds Friday, triggering an automatic shutoff that briefly trapped 60 people in high-speed express elevators.

Winds in Los Angeles ripped a bench from the pavement and hurled a 73-year-old woman 50 feet into the street, but she escaped serious injury.

In Detroit, electrical service was out in some homes and businesses for as long as 18 hours, after a storm swept into southeastern Michigan early Friday.

In Jackson, Miss., the Pearl River flooded city streets, and flash flooding in Tennessee forced evacuations in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Fayetteville.

quickly

Power fails, homes go dark as sun rises

An unexplained equipment failure today plunged 6,400 Clark County homes into darkness, just as many persons were preparing to leave for work.

The outage hit three substations from Felida north to Ridgefield and lasted up to an hour.

Clark County Public Utility District spokesman Mick Shutt said the substations were knocked out when a Bonneville Power Administration transmission line shut down as if there were a short in the neighborhood distribution system.

PUD crews checked main lines and, finding nothing amiss, flipped switches, returning power. One area had its lights restored after 35 minutes but most were closer to one hour, starting at 6:50 a.m.

In Ridgefield, postmaster Chet Scott said carriers had to use flashlights to sort mail. He laughed and added: "I thought (Mount) St. Helens had erupted, and we were all covered up with ashes."

N.Y., was cut off from the outside world as floods blocked two state highways. But many of the residents had been evacuated Friday when the creeks started to rise.

All roads in Kingston, N.Y., were closed and 60 to 80 families were evacuated. Also hard hit by flash floods were the New York towns of Woodstock, Saugerties, Olive, New Paltz and Shandaken.

The National Weather Service said the flooding in parts of New York and New England was the worst since 1955, the year of the last major flood in the Northeast. The town of Tannersville in southeastern New York State had received 9 inches of rain since Friday morning.

In Massachusetts, where the Westfield River surged over its banks after 3 inches of rain fell, Westfield Police Chief Gerald O'Connor also said the water was the highest it's been in his city since the 1955 flood.

Students attending a dance at a high school in

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"Hotel" "Power" "Attack" - Coil is a power source. Another searching effort last week in Gulf of Mexico. Powered.

Dozens trapped in overturned oil rig

OSLO, Norway (AP) - 3/28/80

OSLO, Norway (AP) - A "hotel" platform with more than 200 Norwegian oilfield workers aboard capsized and overturned Thursday night. Rescuers battled gale-force winds in the dark to pull men from the towering waves.

Reports said seven persons were known dead, but dozens were trapped under water or were believed to have been swept away from the rescue area. Authorities said early Friday morning that 102 persons were rescued and nearly 85 others on a nearby production rig were evacuated by British and Norwegian helicopters, ships and divers fighting winds of up to 80 mph. They said many of the platform survivors were injured.

Edinburgh reporter Mike Lloyd of Independent Radio News, who was in contact with oil men in Scotland, said, "Rescue work is still going on, but nothing much can do done until first light." There was a strong feeling that the surface landing had no hope of survival. Some survivors clambered onto an adjacent platform, while others made it to rafts or lifeboats, reports said. About 50 men were said to be trapped, but still alive, in a movie theater that was under water.

Estimates of the number of persons aboard when the platform capsized ranged up to 225, and nearly all were said to be Norwegian.

A spokesman in Norway for Phillips Petroleum Co. said a huge wave driven by winds of about 50 mph collapsed one of the platform's five legs just as men were passing to and from it during a shift change, and the structure turned over in the sea.

"Hotel" platforms, on which oil workers live, resemble apartment buildings on stilts.

Phillips, which made the first strike in the Norwegian North Sea more than 10 years ago, chartered the platform.

A Phillips spokesman said the dead were found in water near the platform. He said 16 of those rescued had clambered onto an adjoining platform and 75 were in lifeboats and rafts. The whereabouts of the other survivors at the time they were rescued were not immediately known.

The spokesman said it was feared that those wearing just life jackets were swept out of the search area by the waves.

The British Defense Ministry said 28 men managed to climb aboard a life raft dropped by a Royal Air Force plane.

It quoted a company spokesman in Norway as saying that some aboard could have been Americans and British catering staff. The report could not be confirmed.

A company spokesman said the 85 workers evacuated were from the Edda production rig 300 yards from the capsized platform, including some Americans, were taken to the neighboring Ekofisk field installations. The identities of the Americans were not immediately known. A company spokesman said oil and gas production in the area was halted.

At midnight, the Royal Air Force announced helicopters were abandoning the rescue effort because of continuing bad weather, but that ships and planes were continuing the search.

"This is a catastrophe," said Oyvind Roth, a spokesman for Phillips in Stavanger, Norway, which had chartered the platform owned by the Stavanger Drilling Co. "The accident happened just in the middle of a shift when workers were moving from the production platform to their living quarters."

The Pittreavie Castle rescue center said the stricken rig was beginning to break up in the high seas and that people had been spotted floating below the surface of the water.

A spokesman at the Royal Air Force search center at Pittreavie Castle, Scotland, said a rescue plane acting as a communications link with search teams was told 50 persons were believed trapped in the theater.

Press Association, the British domestic news agency, quoted a rescue spokesman at Stavanger as saying that those in the theater were believed alive, that the platform is floating upside down and we are hoping to send divers and diving bells down."

The "Alexander Kielland" platform is located in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea oil fields in the Edda field, which neighbors Ekofisk where a 1978 Phillips oil rig blowout spilled thousands of tons of oil into the ocean.

OIL PLATFORM CAPSIZES

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Oregon Journal 3-24-80

Powerful spring storms
bring blizzards, floods

By United Press International
Powerful spring storms brought torrential rains and a blinding blizzard on the first weekend of spring. Floods claimed at least four lives and a fifth person was presumed drowned.

A flash-flood warning was in effect Monday for Connecticut and flash-flood watches were posted for parts of Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. Heavy weekend rains forced about 440 New York families from their homes.

A concoction of rain, sleet, snow and whistling winds hit Iowa Monday morning, temporarily knocking out power for at least three suburban Des Moines towns. The National Weather Service said the state could expect 3 inches of snow.

A blizzard warning was issued Sunday night for southwestern and south-central Kansas. In parts of the state, 35 mph wind, whipping as much as 15 inches of snow, made traveling almost impossible.

In New York, the Red Cross said more than one-quarter of the evacuated families lived in Schoharie County. Many rivers in central and southeastern New York reached their highest levels in several years.

A man trapped in his car in the Greene County hamlet of Leeds was washed away Saturday by the flooding Catskill Creek, troopers said.

State police reported another storm-related fatality when Randall Wood, 19, a Hobart College freshman from Auburn, Mass., was killed when he fell into a run-off gorge of Seneca Lake south of Geneva early Saturday.

In Connecticut, two youths died and a third man was presumed drowned in weekend boating accidents on rivers swollen by 5 inches of rain.

John Throckmorton, 16, and John Sussenguth, 17, both of Wilton, were swept into the gushing Norwalk River in Wilton and drowned after a raft they and another teen were riding capsized. Gregory Wilson, 16, was pulled to safety by police and later treated for exposure and released.

In another boating accident, police called off a search at nightfall Sunday for Donald Cornwall, 44, of North Haven, who was presumed drowned when a canoe he and a companion were in capsized as it went over a falls on the Mill River in Sleeping Giant State Park. The search resumed Monday.

The Connecticut River crested at 2 to 3 feet above its 16-foot flood stage and the Housatonic crested but was expected to be above flood stage until Monday.

Northern Mississippi residents braced under a flash-flood watch Sunday night as a new storm system threatened to dump more rain on the state's already swollen rivers and streams.

"The ground is still saturated from last week's heavy rainfall," the Weather Service said. "Therefore, most of what falls tonight will run off into streams and rivers that are already swollen."

In Kansas, a Dodge City resident said the conditions were dangerous there, as drifting snow and 30 to 35 mph wind made travel hazardous.

"Everybody's just kind of dug in," said Frank Guff of Dodge City. "Nobody has any business being outside."

3-24-80 Oregon Journal

Flood-swollen lake receding

LAKE ELSINORE, Calif. (UPI) -- Flood-swollen Lake Elsinore -- now three times its normal size -- has finally started to recede.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers measured a nearly half-inch drop in the water level Saturday, the first time the spreading lake has stopped growing in more than a month.

The lake crested Friday at 1,265.72 feet above sea level -- 20 feet deeper than it was earlier this year -- then fell four-tenths of an inch Saturday. Officials said the trend will continue if there are no heavy rains.

The rising waters left many homes submerged -- rooftops pock the lake surface and utility poles poke out of the murky marsh.

Riverside County spokesman John Jacobs said up to 300 houses, mobile homes and businesses were flooded, and 230 more were damaged. Nearly 700 permanent trailers and mobile homes, and 250 permanent businesses were damaged or moved to higher ground.

The small resort community suffered an estimated $34 million in damage -- $25 million to private property and at least $8.7 million to public property.

Oregon Journal 3-25-80

Blizzard
maroons
travelers

JETMORE, Kan. (AP) -- More than 100 travelers huddled in a church in this small southwestern Kansas town Monday after spending the night on pews and behind the pulpit when they were stranded by one of the worst blizzards in the state this century.

The 135 unexpected guests at the United Presbyterian Church, including a baseball team from a Colorado junior college, were among thousands across the state who took refuge from the snowstorm at motels, National Guard armories and even a city jail.

The storm left up to a foot of snow in the Oklahoma Panhandle, where rescue crews freed dozens of people stranded in snowbound vehicles Sunday night.

Near Dodge City, in western Kansas, an armored personnel carrier was pressed into service to break through drifts and rescue more than 40 motorists, some of whom had been stranded in their cars for up to 16 hours. Drifts as deep as 3 feet and abandoned cars prevented snowplows from getting through.

"The area is paralyzed," said Phil Shideler of the National Weather Service in Topeka. Winds up to 45 mph accompanied the fast-moving storm and reduced visibility to near zero in some spots.

"You could write a novel about this," said the Rev. Stan Adamson of the church in Jetmore, which has a population of about 1,000. He described how two young mothers and their children were separated from other families in their party when their car made it to Jetmore but two other cars became marooned north of town.

"They were really worried because there were children in the other cars. The mothers were here from 6 o'clock until about 9:30, and then the sheriff came in carrying the kids. It was quite a poignant reunion. There were a lot of tears and kisses," Adamson said.

The Storms are "The Force" reaching out to knock out power forms. Owens