My family and I had a very long and eventful experience with Snowmageddon. It started in Kitchener where we were visiting my Aunt when the storm started. We decided that we had better head home since it was predicted to get worse. My husband, 2 children and I drove home in a little standard mustang. It was a crazy 4 hour ride, but we made it.
The next day the storm had really picked up and was piling snow high everywhere. Transport trucks began lining the streets in town, parking for shelter as the truck stop was now over capacity. Travelers filled the motels in Reece's Corners and they also started lining the streets in town, some making it to Petrolia. We soon heard that the Truck Stop and Tim Horton's in Reece's Corners were completely filled, the highway had come to a standstill in the West lanes, as had London Line and people were stranded. I spoke to a friend of mine who is a Wyoming Lion's Club member and he and I went to the hall to open it up as a place for the truck drivers and travelers to start going to get warm and have a bathroom. We grabbed some frozen lasagnas and started cooking them before heading out into the storm to go truck to truck, car to car telling everyone we had opened up the hall.
Later that night we quickly realized it wasn't going to be big enough so the shelter was moved to the Wyoming Fair Grounds. Once we had the fairgrounds opened, registration set up and people moved I was called to get my school bus and go with a snow plow and police escort out to the highway to begin rescuing more stranded motorist. We spent hours on the highway checking every mound of snow big enough to hide a small car, digging access to vehicles to be able to get people out and loading everyone on my bus, making trips back to the shelter when we got full. We found one car that was completely buried in snow, it looked just like a snowdrift. The plows had gone around it and buried it deeper because they didn't know that they were there.
Inside we found a couple guys in shorts and T-shirts who had just flown home from Florida and were trying to make it to home in Sarnia. Their car had just run out of gas 15 min prior to us showing up and their cell phones were dead. We got to them just in the nick of time.
At the shelter, the resident's of Wyoming had really come together. Donations of food, blankets, pillows, dry clothing and toiletries poured in along with offers of help. We had a full registration table set up upon entry where we took everyone's information along with any health and medication concerns. The Wyoming Fire Department was there to check and monitor anyone who had medical conditions and we soon had a paramedic join that team as they had become stranded on their way home from work as well. The Fair Board ladies came together and quickly organized all the food and did the cooking and serving. Wyoming Foodland stepped up in a huge way, donating food and toiletries and anything else they could. I became designated as the police liaison in the shelter as I am also part of the Petrolia Fire Department on the now SORT (Support Operations Response Team) Was CERV (Community Emergency Response Volunteers) and have experience running emergency shelters and coordinating with police.
The residents of Wyoming then stepped up again in a huge way. We began receiving phone calls and had people showing up the shelter asking to “adopt” people who were stranded, offering beds to sleep in and hot showers instead of the cots we had and sink baths. I can’t remember the final number of stranded people who got “adopted” but it was a lot. We took down the information of who was staying with who, where and how to reach them when we were finally able to take them back to their cars. My family took in a woman who is still a good friend of ours today. So many heartwarming stories came out of Snowmageddon. Wyoming as a whole really, really stepped up and showed such generosity, kindness and small town strength. Never have a seen a small town shine as Wyoming did during that disaster.
Once the storm finally subsided and the snow plows were finally able to clear the highway enough to start clearing the stand still, I began taking busloads of people back to the highway. Whenever we matched a car with the driver we made sure the car was fully dug out and actually started before we moved on. The police and towing companies were out there with cans of gas for those who had run out. No one was left to fend for themselves. Once all the cars and drivers were safely on their way the town came together again and cleaned up the fair building quickly and any leftover donations were picked up or donated to the Goodwill. I’ll never forget Snowmageddon and the time our small town came together in the most impressive way!
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