JANESVILLE, Wis. --
As the blizzard pounded Janesville last week, 66-year-old Joe Latta laid under a pile of snow thinking about the end.
"I thought if no one comes out, if no one sees me, could die." Latta said.
Latta walked down his driveway early in the morning to get his newspaper and mail when he fell in a mound of snow and couldn't get out.
To make matters worse, a plow came by and covered him even further.
As he lay buried for nearly four hours, Latta stuck his hand out of snow.
"I just hoped someone might see me," Latta said.
Across the street, Betsy Nelson was looking out the window to check on her son's snowblowing efforts when she saw what she thought was an animal.
"I looked again and thought that's not an animal, that's a piece of paper. So I walked away but I thought I didn't feel right. So I grabbed my trusty binoculars and looked over there and said 'that's a hand,'" Nelson said.
Nelson called her next door neighbor, Todd Herrington, who is a Janesville firefighter and he ran to Latta's.
"I looked down the driveway and there were three-and-four-foot snow drifts and I didn't see any hand or arm or anything," Herrington said.
"I hollered out the door 'no it's closer to the mailbox,'" Nelson said.
"I looked and sure enough there was a hand just below the wrist sticking out of the snowbank," Herrington said.
Latta was rushed to the hospital, where they warmed him up.
He said he can still feel the cold but is otherwise recovering.
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