Worst ice storm in years devastates the Carolinas; trees continue to fall on power lines

Friday, December 6th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) _ Despite round-the-clock repair efforts, nearly 1.8 million customers remained without electricity Friday in the Carolinas as ice-laden branches continued to fell power lines.

The icy aftermath of the storm Wednesday and Thursday _ which many in the Carolinas compared to recent hurricanes for its scale of destruction _ proved worse than the storm itself. And across the East Coast, snow and ice snarled air travel and kept children home from school.

Friday brought warmer temperatures in the eastern United States, but utilities struggled to make progress as nighttime temperatures dropped to around freezing.

Carolina Power & Light, which reported 350,000 customers without power Thursday night, had 411,000 in the dark Friday morning.

``The tree limbs are still falling and getting tangled up in our power lines,'' said Mike McCracken, a spokesman for the Raleigh-based utility. ``We've made ground in some areas, but in other locations, we've lost ground.''

McCracken described the storm as ``Fran with ice,'' referring to the devastating hurricane that struck North Carolina in 1996.

Charlotte-based Duke Power said it could do no more than hold steady, spokesman Tom Shiel said. The utility reported 993,000 customers without power in North Carolina and 287,000 in South Carolina. North Carolina's electric cooperatives reported 105,000 outages.

``This is the worst storm in company history,'' Duke Power Vice President George Acker said.

Even Friday's milder temperatures could cause problems, said Ron Humble of the National Weather Service in Raleigh. Trees are so stressed by the weight of the ice that they could continue to splinter even after the ice is gone, he said.

At least 24 deaths had been blamed on the storm since it blew across the Southern Plains earlier in the week, including a Virginia woman who police said froze to death after her car slid off the road. In North Carolina, deaths included a 9-year-old boy killed in a fire started by a heater.

Up to a foot of snow fell in places from New Mexico to North Carolina. After hammering the Plains and the South, the storm barreled toward the Northeast, where major cities including New York and Philadelphia were blanketed with snow Thursday.

``It's horrible out there,'' said Errol Carter, a lawyer from Edison, N.J. ``I live less than 10 minutes from the train station, and I almost got in two accidents on the way there.''

Two people died in New York, including a noted jazz saxophonist, Robert Berg, 51, who was killed Thursday when a cement truck collided with his SUV on a snow-slickened Long Island road. Berg toured with Miles Davis in the 1980s and had a number of solo albums.

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley and South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges declared states of emergency, and hundreds of repair workers were streaming in to repair damage to power lines.

Some 3,000 travelers were stranded at North Carolina's Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Travelers faced cancellations and long flight delays at the New York City area's LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark, N.J., airports.

On the ground, highway traffic slowed to a crawl or stalled behind wrecks. Buses ran behind schedule, and commuter railroads in the New York City region added trains to cope with an increase in riders.

The steady snowfall in New York turned avenues and sidewalks treacherously slick, but tourists busily snapped photos.

``This just seems like the way New York should be, you know?'' said Jennifer McDaniel of Detroit. ``The snow and the lights and decorations _ it just seems right.''