Tap on Car Window Saves Man Buried in Snow for 16 Days

"Here is this poor little guy sitting with his hand frosted up like a little claw, wearing nothing but a T-shirt," said June Bloom, who dug Thomas Wade Truett out of the snow in the Deschutes forest in central Oregon. "He was so thin and grey in the face."

Mr Truett was discovered by chance in the middle of a weather system that has paralysed large parts of America. Mrs Bloom's husband, Chuck, saw a frozen black backpack, which had been uncovered by a snowmobile, as the couple negotiated a little-used road.

They stopped to throw the bag aside, the impact dislodging flakes to reveal a car window. "All of a sudden this little claw hand comes up and taps twice," said Mrs Bloom. "It just scared us to death. We thought, 'Oh my God, there's somebody in there.'

"We gave some guy his life and we didn't even set out to do anything remarkable that day. I'm not real religious but somebody was directing all of us up there. We never go up there, which is the amazing thing. We never saw one solitary soul the whole day."

Mr Truett was said to be in fair condition in hospital yesterday, suffering from advanced hypothermia. He lost 20lb during the ordeal, fuelled only by orange juice, a quart of water and a packet of almond M&M sweets.

After his car had become stuck in the snow, Mr Truett had spent four days in the woods, using a cigarette lighter to set small fires. When the lighter ran out, he tried to hike out of the forest but was too weak and returned to his car, where he wrote a farewell note to his parents.

Nine days later, Mr Truett had just enough strength to throw the backpack, a notebook and some clothes out of one of the car windows as a signal to passersby.

Mr Truett is expected to be fit to leave hospital within a week, but military police will take him back the 800 miles to Ellsworth air force base in South Dakota to answer charges that he deserted his job as an air force fuel manager.

Mr Truett's was only the most striking of the human dramas driven by the weather, with the effects most widespread across the south. Parts of the Texas panhandle were under 20in of snow, much of neighbouring Arkansas had half an inch of ice, with Oklahoma and Louisiana also affected.

Snow and ice brought down power lines in much of the region and 500,000 people were without electricity.