Nyberg: News 8 staff stuck in blizzard over night

(WTNH) -- To be a reporter is to cover what's going on around you and sometimes you become a part of the story. That was the case on Friday night at the height of the blizzard when News 8 reporter, Jacquie Slater and J-P Coleman slid off I-91, went down an embankment and spent more than 10 hours in their car before being rescued by the National Guard.

Slater sat down with Ann Nyberg earlier.

"As that snow was coming down I thought, well I'm in an embankment, and now it's drifting, I need to keep opening my door, so I would open the door, I would take a scraper, and like scrape a long side so that I could get out, so they could find you when, that's the other thing you're concerned about that drifting and what's going to happen so J.P. got out of the car, it was almost too deep, I'm only 5-foot-1, so it was almost too deep for me to walk, so I was basically stuck in that passenger seat for 10 and a half hours, he got out, he shoveled around the exhaust and we would keep the car running for about 45 minutes and then we would shut it off, I had my giant coat and I had another coat over my legs, we had snacks, we had some water, but we were stuck in the car for 10 and a half hours, we didn't drink we didn't eat, because you were conserving, it's funny what you start to do, so when does help come and what happens, well what happened was plows would come by every now and then and we would still see cars and trucks, I stopped being nervous about somebody sliding off the road, cause the traffic was so low, as far as the number of cars that were going by that were, there was a hill so I was pretty sure it was going to get stuck."

An independent plower by the name of Cosmos tried to help get the news crew out during the night but he got stuck too.

Through the night they all checked on each other by phone.