Re: A just out blizzard story by Peter Salter (aka Mack)

This is a truly tragic tale.  I trust your family knows to stay safe
 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Hunter Gray <[email protected]>
To: Bear Without Borders <[email protected]>
Cc: Redbadbear <[email protected]>; SycamoreCanyon <[email protected]>; marxist <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, Apr 15, 2013 9:27 am
Subject: [marxist] A just out blizzard story by Peter Salter (aka Mack)


  
    
                  

Mack, youngest son, called a little while ago -- concerned about Cameron et al.  Mack has spent most of his life in the Plains part of the West and some time in the Butte/Anaconda section of Montana.  He told me of this poignant story he'd just done -- blizzard tragedy in the Nebraska Panhandle.  (H)
 
----- Original Message ----- 

From: Peter Salter 
To: Hunter Gray 
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2013 7:05 AM
Subject: That blizzard story




Here's the story I told you about -- the woman who died, the son who nearly did.


http://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/nebraska/searchers-find-life-death-in-nebraska-snowstorm/article_cb8cee3b-40a0-5a15-84de-46e8a3d3a0be.html

By PETER SALTER / Lincoln Journal Star

They found the 19-year-old huddled in the back of the abandoned farmhouse, snow whipping in where the windows used to be.


He wore a good coat and gloves, and that may have saved his life. But he had on tennis shoes, and after nearly 18 hours in the cold, he couldn't stand on his own.
He was freezing, but he was coherent. He already knew what had happened to his mother.
“He said he helped her; he carried her for a while,” said Brian Jelinek, a 31-year-old farmer who went out into Tuesday's snowstorm on his snowmobile.
“I think she died when they were walking. He knew she was dead before we told him, but he kept going because he didn't want to die out there.”
* * *
It was only raining when Lisa Conrad, 37, left for work Monday afternoon.
She wasn't wearing a coat.
She worked for a cleaning service contracted by Burlington Northern-Santa Fe in Alliance. Her husband, Brandon, works at the railroad, too, for General Electric. They moved to Nebraska about two years ago from Vancouver, Wash., with their son.
They celebrated their 20th anniversary in February, getting dinner with friends in Scottsbluff.
On Monday night at work, they talked at about 11:30, just before she left for the 10-mile drive home to Berea.
It already was snowing hard.
“I said, ‘Do you want me to drive you home?’” Brandon remembered Wednesday. "She said, 'I think I can make it.’ We'd never been in a blizzard before, so we didn't know.”
The state hadn't yet closed U.S. 385 north of Alliance, but Lisa would have struggled to see where she was going.
“It was a whiteout condition,” said Nebraska State Patrol Capt. Mike Gaudreault. “We were receiving 30- to 40-mile-per-hour winds, which was causing blinding, zero-visibility conditions with snow and blowing snow.”
Lisa called her husband from the road to tell him it was hard to see. She called again when she hit a snowdrift and got stuck about a mile south of their home. She called Brandon Jr., too, asking him for help, and for a coat.
She was on the phone again with her husband when she saw their son approaching on foot. They were going to walk home, so she had to hang up, she said. 
* * *
Brandon Sr. got off work about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday and headed for home, his four-wheel-drive struggling on the highway.
“I didn't know it was that bad; otherwise, I would have told her to stay in the car.”
He made it as far as her car but couldn't drive farther. He stepped out into the snow with a flashlight.
“I looked around and didn't see her. I didn’t see anything. You couldn't see. You just couldn't see.”
He knew if he followed a fence line north he would get to a house. He made it to the porch, knocked on the door, asking strangers for help.
He was hoping he would find his family there, too.
* * *
Mother and son should have headed north, along the same road Brandon Jr. had walked to reach her.
Instead, they turned west onto the gravel of Johnson Road.
“Obviously, it would have made sense to stay on the highway,” Gaudreault said.
But he added: It would have been hard to make sense of anything that night. The snow was blinding. And the power was out, so there were no lights to guide the pair back to Berea. It would have been safest to stay in the car.
Brandon Sr. called 911 from the strangers' house. Too treacherous to try to get out and search, he said he was told.
He tried to reach his wife.
“I kept trying to call and call and call. It would ring, and her cellphone would go to voice mail.”
Authorities called him the next morning. They had gone to his house -- nearly getting stuck. No one was home.
They tried searching, but the snow was too much, even for their four-wheel-drive Dodge pickups and Durangos, said Box Butte County Sheriff Tammy Mowry.
“Twice we went up that way. Our office and the State Patrol went together,” she said. “The drifts -- there are 9-foot drifts in some places.”
The patrol called off the search at about 4:30 p.m. because of the conditions. But even before then, the sheriff contacted some men she knew, snowmobilers who routinely ride in the Snowy Range of Wyoming.
“I just wasn't willing to let it go. I've got to find somebody,” she said. “I called those people and asked them to go look.”
* * *
Brian Jelinek and his friends, Mark Kimmel and Dan Carnine, picked up their snowmobiles south of Alliance and headed north. They unloaded near Berea.
They found Lisa's car at about 4 p.m. They found her body about 25 minutes later, half a mile west of the highway. Kimmel spotted her coat first, Jelinek said. She was on the side of the road, nearly covered in snow.
They called 911, and Kimmel stayed with her while the other two kept searching.
They scanned the ditches for about two miles when they saw an abandoned house.
“We walked in there and I just yelled, ‘Hello,’” Jelinek said.
Someone yelled back.
Carnine stayed with Brandon Jr. while Jelinek rode back to get his truck. He returned to the farmhouse and they helped the teen into the Ford. They didn't want to wait for an ambulance.
“And I busted through the snowdrifts, turned the heat on and I took off and headed to the hospital.”
The next day, Wednesday, the sheriff asked them to patrol another stretch of closed road. Just in case.
“I have no words for my appreciation for those guys,” the sheriff said. “These people are fantastic.”
* * *
Lisa Conrad died of exposure. Brandon Jr. was in stable condition Wednesday at Box Butte General Hospital in Alliance, being treated for frostbite and hypothermia.
“His feet are fine now, his hands are fine. The doctor said he's going to be fine,” his father said.
Brandon Jr. took his mother her coat that night, the father said. But then they got disoriented.
He tried helping her, but she couldn't make it. He tried carrying her. He found the farmhouse and then ventured back out to try to help her again, his father said. He just couldn't.
Brandon Sr. sobs quietly when he hears how the snowmobilers helped.
“Thank God someone decided to look for them, and then they found my son.”

Reach Peter Salter at 402-473-7254 or [email protected].