WS Chronicle

Meetings and church services were canceled as well as events and school as an early winter storm dropped at least a foot of snow in Winston-Salem Sunday and part of Monday. The cancellations lasted through Wednesday. Plans were to resume classes in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools system on Thursday. The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education announced that the meeting scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 11, is being held today, Thursday, Dec. 13. The board will meet in open session at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Education Building, 4801 Bethania Station Road. The agenda and supporting materials can be found on the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School website.

The City of Winston-Salem announced that all garbage, recycling and yard waste collections would resume Thursday.

Streets were treacherous Sunday but by Tuesday, the city of Winston-Salem reported that by mid-afternoon, street clearing was at 100 percent of major roads and approximately 85 percent of collector streets.

The Associated Press reported that snowed-in Southerners made the best of a day without work or school Monday while officials warned that roads remained treacherous even as the worst of a wintry storm departed.

Snow, sleet and freezing rain tapered off across states from Georgia to West Virginia that were recovering from outages, canceled flights and numerous car wrecks. The storm was blamed for at least three deaths in North Carolina.

Scores of schools canceled class Monday, and many businesses and government offices – including Virginia’s executive-branch agencies in Richmond – were closed.

For those staying close to home, the storm provided a chance to sled, drink hot chocolate with friends or simply take in a wintry landscape in places that don’t often see so much of the white stuff.

In North Carolina’s Durham County, where a foot (.3 meters) fell in places Sunday, kids reveled in a day off from school as a second dusting of snow and sleet fell Monday morning. Children threw snowballs or built snowmen, and a young girl in a pink jacket threw her hands up and yelled “Merry Christmas!” at a passer-by along a residential sidewalk.

A few cars passed on the road, but several people decided it was safer to get where they were going by foot.

Andrew Dedman, 16, was walking about a mile (1.6 kilometers) through a flurry to visit a friend on their day off from high school.

“We’re just going to hang out, sit around, drink hot chocolate,” he said.

Others ventured Monday into ankle-deep snowdrifts to walk dogs. Ron Gordon, 75, donned boots and a hooded winter jacket to take out his dog, Easy.

“She seems to like it,” he said, holding a walking stick for extra traction. “She enjoys it more than I do.”

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday that the worst of the storm had passed, but residents – particularly motorists – should keep watch for dangerous conditions.  The Highway Patrol already had responded to more than 670 collisions and nearly 1,600 calls for services since the storm began.

Snowfall totals topped 20 inches (50 centimeters) in some areas of the western part of the state, according to the National Weather Service.

A truck driver died Sunday after suffering what appeared to be a heart attack from shoveling out his rig that got stuck at the height of the storm along Interstate 77 in the central part of the state, Yadkin County Emergency Services Director Keith Vestal said.

The state emergency operations center also said one man died Sunday when a tree fell on him in Mecklenburg County, while an ailing woman died in Haywood County when her oxygen was cut off due to power outages.

Governors and local officials declared emergencies ahead of the storm crossing several Southern states, which hit portions of North Carolina and Virginia particularly hard.

Flight cancellations and delays continued Monday at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, the sixth busiest airport in the country.

More than 244,000 power outages were reported across the region Monday morning, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of it, according to poweroutage.us. South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee also had outages reported Monday.

Associated Press writers Jonathan Drew in Durham and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina and Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia contributed to this report.