As rescuers waded through waist-high snowdrifts to reach stranded motorists and homeowners dug themselves out Thursday, public officials started tallying the costs of dealing with back-to-back snowstorms that set winter records throughout the Mid-Atlantic.
Meanwhile, central and southern Alabama are taking up where the East Coast left off, closing schools and most government offices Friday in anticipation of a storm that could deliver 3 to 5 inches of snow.
"We don't have the equipment ... to clear roads," said Greg Faulkner, superintendent of the Autauga County Public School System.
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Friday's storm will also bring snow to Georgia and South Carolina, said Weather Channel meteorologist Mark Ressler.
An additional 3 to 6 inches of snow is forecast from Saturday through Tuesday, starting in the northern Plains and ending in the Mid-Atlantic and New England. New England could get another foot, Ressler said.
A forecast of colder-than-average temperatures means the heavy snow will melt slowly and poses no risk of serious flooding, Ressler said.
Virginia will bust its $70 million snow-removal budget by at least 50% this year, Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton said. But an accurate tally involves "more than just the plowing," he said.
The state had to move workers and equipment to Northern Virginia, house and feed them, and pay higher prices for salt and chemicals when those ran out — and once the snow melts, "we expect to have major pothole problems," he said.
In Delaware, schools have asked the state to forgive some of the class days lost to snow, state Education Department spokesman Ron Gough said.
Delaware National Guard troops reached the New Castle home of Daniel Coleman, 46, on Thursday morning. He was glad to see them after missing dialysis on Wednesday.
"It's actually a matter of life and death for me," said Coleman, who has kidney disease.
In Frederick County, Md., firefighters struggled to reach 39 vehicles stranded in snowdrifts as high as 8 feet Wednesday night and Thursday.
Emergency workers lost contact with one of the motorists, a man in his 20s, after his cellphone battery died. They tried three times to reach him overnight through howling winds and drifts 6 to 8 feet high, said Andy Arnold, assistant chief of the Carroll Manor Fire Company of Adamstown, Md. He would not disclose the man's name.
As day broke, the firefighters tried again, driving a pickup behind a farmer's tractor with a shovel attachment, then hiking almost a mile until they found him in his car, alive and safe. They called in a snowmobiler who had volunteered to help.
The snowmobiler, Mike Uphold, 50, of Frederick, said he rescued 12 people overnight and Thursday, including a snowplow driver whose truck was mired in drifts up to its windows.
Uphold said he took the man to an ambulance that drove him for a checkup at a hospital. "He was joyful and happy to see us," Uphold said.
Contributing: Doyle Rice; Mike Chalmers and Esteban Parra of The News Journal in Wilmington, Del.; Marty Roney of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser
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