Associated Press
"Traffic was moving again Tuesday on the stretch of Interstate 70 closed across parts of western and central Kansas due to blowing and drifting snow from the storm that began Sunday. The highway, the main east-west route through the state, had been closed from Salina to the Colorado line, a distance of about 250 miles, after road conditions left motels and emergency shelters filled with hundreds of stranded motorists.
The closings began Sunday afternoon, starting first at Goodland, then moving eastward to Colby and Russell. By Monday afternoon, the closing was extended to Salina. Steve Swartz, a Kansas Department of Transportation spokesman in Topeka, said the interstate was reopened in phases during the night, with all sections cleared for travel again by 6 a.m. Tuesday.
"There was a fair amount of snow out there," he said. "The main problem was that the high winds made visibility very poor." The National Weather Service reported that winds had been gusting at above 60 miles per hour.
Joy Moser of the Kansas Division of Emergency Management said almost 1,000 people spent Sunday night in shelters along I-70. More than 200 stayed at a shelter on the campus of Fort Hays State University, sleeping on cots and exercise mats, and an additional 200 were at Northwest Kansas Technical College in Goodland. Mike and Ilona Dorsey, traveling home to Denver after visiting relatives in Topeka, were in Colby on Sunday afternoon when the interstate closed. They wound up spending the night at Fort Hays State.
"We stopped at every town from Colby to here and couldn't get a hotel," Dorsey told The Hays Daily News. "Everything was filled."
Nearly 80 people traveling on two Greyhound buses that had to stop at Colby on Sunday spent 10 hours on the buses and at the bus station before being taken to a shelter. One passenger, Lewis Camby, 37, of New London, Conn., said the bus drivers got a room at a motel but left them on the vehicles. "We were notified at about 1:30 p.m. that the roads were closed," Camby said. "Our driver proceeded to notify us that we were pretty much on our own." Jim Engel, director of emergency management for Thomas County, said the drivers showed passengers how to open and close the bus doors and left them to fend for themselves. "The bus drivers got a room for themselves and didn't bother to take care of their passengers," he said. "It may be their policy, but it's not common sense."
The passengers, some with infants, were left to the BP 24/7 bus stop staff, said Lisa Kirby, assistant manager there. She and Chris Hughes, a night shift clerk, dealt with the crowd. Kirby said the passengers were "very polite, very considerate and very compassionate. We all worked together." Camby praised the BP 24/7 staff for allowing passengers to take showers and crowd into the store.
Engel said he got a call Sunday night from a man whose two grandsons, 8 and 10, were on one of the buses, and had called their grandfather from a pay phone at a store about two blocks away. Engel said he located the drivers at a nearby motel and persuaded them, after some debate, to take the passengers to the Red Cross shelter at the Colby Community Building at about 11:30 p.m. Sunday."
If that were MY bus line, those two jokers would have been looking for somebody to pay their motel and food tab and a way home. And then I'd have turned them over to the folks on the bus. How bad can service get?
