Stuck in the Snowan in-depth look at March for Life 2016

by: Kayley Anderson, Tom Hermanek, Abbey Lenz, Kirayle Jones. and Maddie Jarosik

As students awoke on the morning of Saturday, January 23rd, a restless and vague panic crept through the snowbound busses: they had only moved 50 feet in the night. They were supposed to be nearly home, but instead found themselves stuck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike with no exit in sight. Here are their stories.

KA, TH, AL, KJ, MJ, HK - Skutt Catholic - Class A - In-Depth Newspaper Coverage

Allegheny Tunnel - a bottle-neck of wrecks happens here, including multiple semis and a snowplow. This would stop Turnpike traffic for days, including SC students.

90 miles to Pittsburgh

Timeline: Students Stranded in the Snow for 24 Hoursby: Kayley Anderson and Tom Hermanek

Kayley Anderson

Tom Hermanek

March for Life 2016: A Flightline TV Productionby: Kirayle Jones and Abbey Lenz, Flightline TV

We stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for what we’re hoping is a brief traffic jam

We go to sleep hoping and planning that we’ll move by morning and be on time to Omaha

We woke up to find we had moved fifty feet, and were probably not gonna move for a while.

My bus comes to a standstill at mile 132.6 of the Pennsylva-nia Turnpike. We hoped, and expected, to be moving within the hour.

As the ending credits of “Ju-rassic World” roll, we are told that we should be out in about five or six hours, and we all assume that when we wake up, we will be moving.

When I woke up from a night of little sleep, I had a terrifying realization: we hadn’t moved an inch since the evening.

Mile Marker 132.2 - the Peace, Hope, and Love busses are trapped here in accumulating snow for days, with dwindling resources.

Kegg Maintenance - a gas station turned into bathroom salvation...until it too overflowed.

background image compiled from Google Images; front and back cover images from Father Jeff Mollner

Timeline: Students Stranded in the Snow for 24 Hoursby: Kayley Anderson and Tom Hermanek

150 miles to Washington DC

Photos from the Marchby: Maddie Jarosik, SkyHawk Yearbook

Gretchen Purcell, Abby Wendt, Kirayle Jones, Kayley Anderson, and Lizzy Ninneman pause on the National Mall.

Ally Lonie at the Lincoln Memorial Birds perch on a statue at theVietnam memorial

Marchers in their distinctive hats reflect at the Vietnam memorial

We found a bathroom about half a mile away. When we arrived we found a one stall bathroom with a line longer than anything I had ever seen.

The priests on the trip de-cided to hold a Mass on the side of the Turnpike, about 1/2 mile up the road.

We each received one cold slice of pizza for lunch and we have little to no water remaining.

Several people left the bus to dig it out of the snow, be-cause traffic was beginning to move. Some used signs left over from the March for Life and pizza boxes.

We begin moving. The cheering on the bus is loud enough to pop one’s eardrums.

Finally time to go to sleep at the hotel and I have never felt a more comfort-able bed in my life.

After nearly 24 hours, we finally made it out of the turnpike, and arrived at a Travelodge in Bedford, PA.

A few of my roommates walk to a Denny’s, they bring back dinner. The pan-cakes were delicious.

“Ugh, we’ve been stuck here for an hour,” students moaned on Fri-day evening.

“We should be moving when we wake up,” they said as it neared midnight.

“We’re going to be here a while,” students realized when morning came.

The recent snow-storm that slammed the East Coast stranded thou-sands of people across a 40 mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, including over 60 Skutt Catholic students who at-tended the annual March for Life in Washington D.C.

We at The Flight-line feel that the steps taken in response to the snowstorm in Washington D.C. during the annual March for Life were not appropriate, and only put pilgrims on the trip in a hazardous situation.

On Thursday, the day before the storm was supposed to hit, the organizers of the trip sent out an email that students would be leaving on Friday afternoon–instead of Saturday as originally planned–to avoid the storm.

This decision was made in an effort to keep students from being stranded in D.C. dur-ing the storm, but many

Editorial: Trouble on the TurnpikeWhat went wrong on this year’s March for Life

by: the Flightline Staff

students and parents feared that leaving early wouldn’t allow the buses to beat the storm alto-gether; rather, ensure that the buses would be in the middle of a highway when the storm hit.

Unfortunately, that’s just what happened. Buses reached no further than mile 133 of the Penn-sylvania Turnpike before coming to a complete halt. Buses stood in the same place for nearly 24 hours, becoming buried in a total of 30 inches of snow.

This is exactly why we believe that leaving Washington D.C. Friday afternoon was the wrong call. Had the students stayed in Washington for an additional night or two, it is likely that they would have become stuck; however, students would have been stuck in a hotel with running water, food, bathrooms, and electric-ity, not to mention beds to sleep in.

Instead, students were stuck on the turn-pike, where food was run-ning low and water was limited to the bottles in the cargo hold of the bus.

Thankfully, buses were stranded no more than a half mile from a road maintenance center that had bathrooms which had been opened up to those who were stranded. However, the backup on the Pennsylvania Turnpike

spanned 40 miles, making the chances of the buses being stranded within walking distance of bath-rooms incredibly slim.On top of this, communi-cation between the trip or-ganizers and pilgrims and their parents was poor.

For example, many parents, including those of staff members of The Flightline who were on the trip, did not receive any email updates from trip organizers. The only way for these parents to be informed was to have other parents forward them the emails, or, hav-ing their child update them (assuming that their child had both cell recep-tion and some power left in their battery).

Parents who were getting emails received information that, at times, was misleading. For exam-ple, an email sent to par-ents on Saturday night, as buses were finally leaving the turnpike, stated, “Ar-rangements have been made for hotel rooms in

Bedford, Pa.”

Although that was the case for all pilgrims from Skutt Catholic, students from Marian weren’t so lucky. They spent the night in a local Catholic school’s gym.

Due to several factors which were out of the organiz-ers’ control, but still worked out in their favor, such as the fact that restrooms were just a short walk away from the buses or the fact that much more than enough pizza had been ordered the night before, everything turned out fairly well. However, had these fac-tors not worked out so well, the situation could have been much worse.

Adviser’s Note of Explanation (disregard and judge the entry as is if this isn’t allowed...) The preceding PDFs were published on the Skutt Catholic Flightline as an Issuu, a sort of online magazine. So, the first and last appeared as a sort of cover to the electronic magazine, with the inner pages displaying as spreads. Also, the image on the bottom left of the second page (of a bus stuck in snow) is an interactive PDF button that brings up a short documentary (~5:00 in length) made by broadcast news students who were on the March for Life. That video can be accessed at… https://vimeo.com/156297288 And the In-Depth can be accessed at http://skuttcatholicflightline.com/6489/features/stuck-in-the-snow/ Any further questions, let me know: jrelliott@schools.archomaha.org. Thanks! Joe Elliott Journalism Adviser, Skutt Catholic