Plains States Struggle to Dig Out

Rescue Efforts Target Motorists, Livestock Stranded by Blizzard

In this photo provided by the Kansas Highway Patrol a farm is shown covered with snow Monday, Jan. 1, 2007, near Tribune, Kan. Pilots in a dozen plans were sent up over the plains of Colorado and Kansas on Monday to look for any snowbound travelers following a blizzard that dumped nearly 3 feet of snow and piled it in drifts 15 feet high. (AP Photo/Kansas Highway Patrol) (AP)

DENVER, Jan. 2 -- National Guard helicopters dropped groceries for people and bales of hay for livestock across the storm-swept high plains Tuesday as frigid winds and snowdrifts as high as a horse's shoulders shut down daily life in parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and the Oklahoma panhandle.

Rescue operations were hampered by a shortage of some equipment that has been transferred to Iraq, officials said.

"Normally, we would use the bigger Chinook helicopters for this kind of work, but all three of our Chinooks are deployed in Iraq right now," said Lt. Darin Overstreet of the Colorado National Guard. "We had to use Black Hawks and Hueys, and they're smaller. But we have managed to borrow one Chinook from Oklahoma."

No human deaths have been reported from the weekend blizzard on the plains, but tens of thousands of homes and businesses in eastern Colorado and western Kansas and Nebraska on Tuesday went through a third day without electricity.

Power lines and transmission towers were felled by heavy snow and ice, and blocked roads made emergency repairs extremely difficult.

The big fear in agriculture circles was a massive livestock kill, a fate that sometimes accompanies major snowstorms. A similar blizzard in 1997 killed about 26,000 head of cattle, Colorado's Agriculture Department said, because the animals could not move and ranchers could not get through the snow to feed their herds.

Gov. Bill Owens (R), who flew over the white-swathed plains southeast of Denver on Sunday, ordered a widespread effort to deliver hay to trapped livestock. Snowmobile clubs across the state were asked to volunteer their machines to pull hay-laden sleds across the snow to the cattle. Civil Air Patrol pilots were sweeping the area to spot places where animals were huddling together against the chill.

"These cattle have already gone a number of days without food or water," Colorado Agriculture Commissioner Don Ament told reporters. "They're just going to lay over dead if we don't do something soon."

Overstreet, of the National Guard, said: "On Monday, the Civil Air Patrol surveyed the area using heat sensors to spot large groups of cattle. They located about 3,000 head and mapped out where the groupings are. So Tuesday morning we began the hay-lift operation, following those maps."

The primarily rural counties along the Colorado-Kansas border were first hit hard by the blizzard of Dec. 20-21, the storm that closed Denver International Airport for four days and delayed holiday air travel for tens of thousands.

About a foot of snow remained from that storm when a new front Saturday dropped 15 to 36 inches. Driving winds over the New Year's weekend made snow-clearing almost impossible. Many school districts said they probably would not be able to start classes until next week. The Colorado State Patrol said hundreds of motorists were staying in shelters.

Many were Texans who had been skiing in Colorado during Christmas week and tried in vain to get back home before the New Year's storm hit the plains.

Interstate 70, the major thoroughfare across Colorado and Kansas, was closed from Limon, Colo. -- about 80 miles east of Denver -- to central Kansas. Although the highway was passable for some of that distance, it remained closed because all motels were already filled with travelers waiting for the rest of the interstate to be cleared.

Civil Air Patrol officials sent out scout planes equipped with heat-seeking sensors searching for cars or trucks that may have been buried under snowdrifts and were thus invisible to pilots scanning the pure white plains for trapped people and livestock.

Colorado's Division of Emergency Management said 35 people were rescued from snowed-in vehicles over the weekend.

Although the snow has stopped falling, high winds and freezing temperatures could mean that many ranches, and their livestock, could be cut off from any road deliveries until the weekend.