Posted on 01/01/2007 8:01:28 AM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
DENVER - A fleet of small planes canvassed snow-covered roads in Colorado on Sunday, searching for stranded travelers after a powerful winter storm piled drifts up to 10 feet high across much of the Plains.
National Guard troops have rescued 44 people from the storm, which buried the foothills west of Denver with more than 2 feet of snow. More than 650 people spent Saturday night in shelters, officials said.
The storm that had once stretched nearly from Canada to Mexico was still dumping snow Sunday from Minnesota to Kansas.
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, who declared a statewide emergency for the latest storm and for a pre-Christmas blizzard a week earlier, flew over the frosty landscape on Sunday.
''You can't see where certain state highways are. You can only tell because of the telephone poles,'' Owens said in a phone interview from an airplane.
The Colorado wing of the Civil Air Patrol sent a dozen small planes over the area to look for stranded vehicles, trapped motorists or stranded livestock, spokesman Steve Hamilton said.
One traffic death was blamed on the storm in Colorado, and a tornado spawned by the same weather system killed one person Friday in Texas.
The National Guard was also mobilized in Kansas, where the storm left more than 44,000 homes and businesses without power and closed stretches of more than a dozen highways.
Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius declared an emergency after parts of the state were blanketed with 15 to 32 inches of snow and drifts up to 15 feet high. The state Highway Patrol used an airplane to find stranded motorists.
''This is a very significant storm; it's in the record books,'' said Scott Blair, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
In New Mexico, authorities tried to clear a logjam of vehicles stranded along Interstate 40. The storm dumped up to 2 feet of snow on Albuquerque and 31 inches in Red River.
The Oklahoma Panhandle received up to 18 inches of snow, closing major roads. At least 5,000 utility customers were without electricity.
In North Dakota, the city of Ashley received the state's heaviest snowfall, with 16 inches.
The snow and ice also left between 5,000 and 10,000 Nebraska homes in the dark Sunday, and Omaha officials postponed a planned New Year's Eve fireworks display until Monday, citing potentially dangerous driving conditions.
The storm first struck on Thursday, but many roads in eastern Colorado remained closed Sunday. Interstates 70 and 25 reopened Sunday evening.
In Kansas, heavy snow caused the roof of the fire station in Colby to collapse, and closed all or portions of more than a dozen roads.
Once a stretch of road is cleared, snow drifts back over it, forcing crews to plow the road again, said Ron Kaufman, a spokesman for the Kansas Department of Transportation.
Al Butkus, spokesman for the Kansas utility Aquila Inc., said it could be a week before power is restored to all customers.
''We've gotten 3 inches of ice on wires and connectors, and that ice stays there until it gets above freezing,'' Butkus said. ''And the temperatures aren't moving above freezing.''
Warmer weather was forecast for later in the week.
In my CAP days, we once broke into a BANK at 2AM!!
Bank Pres had bought a new ELT for his airplane, then placed it in a file drawer, which he then slammed closed, setting off the ELT...
Local Police weren't impressed until they recieved a call from the on-duty General at Scott!!
"I mean, an ELT will only squawk for 24 hours or so before the battery goes dead."
In the meantime, every Rescue and first response unit in North Amerca is going nuts....
The priority is to find the ELT, because someone on the other end may need help.
Being that I'm an RF Engineer, in addition to being a pilot, it would be very easy to detect an ELT emitting a signal on 121.5 Mhz by just using a handheld radio and listening for the ping on 121.5. If the ELT were just on the other side of the door the signal would be strong. If not, then they probably wouldn't even hear it ground to ground if they were more than a half mile or so away. These low frequency "antique modulation" aircraft radios just don't work all that great. I think if it were me, and I were risking conviction on Federal charges, or worse, risking getting shot dead by the owner of the hangar I was about to break into, I'd be double dog sure before I broke someone's door down. Having some General call after they'd broken in and damaged my property would result in hysterical laughter on my part as they were carted off to jail. Clearly, the didn't understand how to verify the location of the signal, thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted, where ever they wanted and it was very unprofessional at best. Essentially, what they did was look at a map, saw that my airport on that map and that it was in their target area. Somehow from this they felt that gave them the right to break my property and enter my hangar. It doesn't. They are not law enforcement.
Even if it had been in my hangar I doubt the satellite would have detected it anyway because the steel siding and roof on the hangar would significantly attenuate the signal. The 121.5 Mhz ELT's don't work that great in the best of conditions. That's why they're switching to 406 Mhz.
Clearly, these folks overstepped their boundaries. For all I know this woman was part of the local CAP office, caused serious embarrassment for them with this episode, and that was the reason they denied knowing her.
One thing is for sure, I'm considerably less confident in the CAP abilities in these parts....
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