Recent Bad Weather Affects Mountains of West Virginia

The recent wave of bad weather that has affected areas such as New York, New England, and the Midwest has affected us as well here in the mountains of West Virginia. While the winter weather seemed to take its time getting here this year, it has certainly made a bit of a mess in our small town of Reedsville. As the temperatures started to fall and the heaters started to kick on, no one really thought that there was going to be much of a threat for icy roads considering that only a few inches of snow had fallen and it did not seem to be the heavy wet snow that usually causes the roads to freeze. Man was we wrong!

Our family lives in a trailer park along side of a man road in Reedsville that has a back road that we can take to get to another small development area as opposed to going seven miles around the long way.

This back road has a few small hills, drops, and S-curves along the way to the other main road. At about six o'clock last Monday, my wife said that she did not feel too well and wanted to go see her doctor to make sure that the baby was going to be ok. Following suit as we would normally do, we loaded into the SUV and started heading down the back roads to the other side of town. The roads looked ok as far as we could tell and the snow was not falling too hard at the time so we thought we would be ok driving on this night.

As we got to the half way point through roads, we came up to the downhill S-curve that has a house on one side and a drop off cliff on the other. Just to be safe, I approached the curve at a slow crawl speed (and I was thankful I did). As I attempted to turn the wheel to follow down the curve, all four wheels of the SUV slid across the ice and thankfully skidded into the snow bank (house) side of the road. When I attempted to pull onto the road again, I instantly lost control and slid again. At this point I was scared about the safety of my pregnant wife and unborn son (this is my first winter as a driver, being from the south I had no snow before).