School, rink roofs collapse under snow

The roofs of a Muncie school and a skating rink collapsed just days after the area was hit by about a foot of snow, and a Johnson County man died after having been run over by a plow truck clearing snow from his driveway.

While Indiana continued digging out from a storm earlier in the week that dumped as much as 17 inches of snow at Lafayette, an additional 2 to 3 1/2 inches of snow fell across parts of the state, the National Weather Service said.

The back half of the Gaston Skating Rink building in Delaware County collapsed Friday afternoon, while 15 miles away, a construction crew began work at Muncie's South View Elementary School to prevent further damage from a roof collapse.

No one was hurt in either collapse, but Muncie Community Schools made plans to move all of South View Elementary's 464 students to other schools for possibly the rest of the academic year.

A South View custodian discovered the collapse Thursday after noticing a sagging hallway ceiling. The damage was severe enough that an entire section of the building could collapse, officials said.

''It's a funnel effect, and this is the beginning,'' said J. Robert Taylor, an architect who inspected the building Friday. ''This is the bottom of the funnel.''

Inspections found no damage in the district's other schools, Superintendent Marlin Creasy said.

The Gaston collapse damaged part of the roller rink and a garage, Fire Chief Mike Dulaney said. The collapse knocked over two furnaces, causing a gas leak that led firefighters to evacuate the surrounding area.

Vicki Oliver said she was 17 when she met her husband at the rink, which opened in 1939 in what had been a car dealership.

''It's a sad day,'' she said Friday afternoon. ''I'm just glad it wasn't three hours from now when it was full of children.''

Meanwhile, an 84-year-old rural Greenwood man died Thursday night at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis after a truck clearing snow from his driveway ran over him, police said.

The victim, Roscoe Pike, was injured Thursday morning after he was run over by a truck with a snow plow, Johnson County sheriff's Deputy Steve Edwards said.

After a neighbor saw the collision and yelled at the driver to stop, a passenger got out of the vehicle to help Pike, who was carried into his home and placed in a chair, Edwards said.

He refused medical treatment and paid the driver $40 for the work.

Pike's grandson called for medical help after arriving at the house.

''Mr. Pike told me that the truck backed into him and knocked him down and he thought it ran over his left leg,'' Edwards wrote.

Two people died in crashes on snowy Indiana highways on Wednesday.

The fire was extinguished within a few minutes. The basement and main floor sustained heavy smoke damage, and the basement also sustained heavy water damage.


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