Her Car Buried in Snow, Mom Writes Letters to Kids

Some amazing stories are emerging in the aftermath of Buffalo's freak storm, and this one is right up there: As the Buffalo News recounts, Karen Rossi got stuck in a snowbank while driving home from work at 3am Tuesday. A plow then jammed her further into the snowbank, and the crazy snow kept coming and coming, burying her completely. “It felt like I was underground, buried in a casket,” she tells the newspaper. “It was surreal. It was just silent for hours. Nobody came. And my phone had died." Things got so bleak that Rossi, 47, wrote goodbye notes to her daughters on scraps of paper from her purse.

While trapped, Rossi was able to crawl out a window and up through the snow, though she couldn't make it out. Finally, she managed to jam the end of her red snow brush into open air. “I waved that forever," she recalls. "My arm would get sore, and I would stop, and then start again.” A passing motorist spotted it around 4pm Tuesday—13 hours after she first got stuck—and dug her out. As for those farewell notes, "My kids don't even want to see them," says Rossi. Too painful. But she's hanging on to them both in case they change their minds someday. (Click for the full story.) The storm's death toll, meanwhile, remains at 12, reports AP. (More uplifting news stories.)