$315-Million Lottery Winner

DES MOINES —  Somewhere in West Virginia, someone is about to celebrate a green Christmas.

One winning ticket was sold in that state for the nearly $315-million Powerball lottery Wednesday night, according to a spokesman for contest operator the Multi-State Lottery Assn.

The winning numbers were 5, 14, 16, 29 and 53 and the “Powerball” was 7.

The jackpot was the largest ever taken by a single Powerball ticket, association spokesman Joe Mahoney said; it was the third-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history. Powerball, the nation’s largest lottery game, is played in 23 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands.

The winner, who has not been identified, now has to decide whether to take the 29-year annuity or the cash option worth $170,505,876. The ticket holder will have 60 days after the ticket is validated to make that decision, Mahoney said.

The whopping Powerball jackpot jumped to $314.9 million shortly before the numbers were drawn Wednesday night, making it the biggest jackpot in the history of the multi-state lottery.

The new jackpot came after holiday sales were much higher than expected, Mahoney said.

“We were always planning on Wednesday, Christmas Day, to be a very light day for sales,” he said. “Monday and Tuesday were much higher than we expected them to be, and [Christmas] ... was much higher than we anticipated it to be.”

But because gas stations and convenience stores -- typical lottery retailers -- were open Christmas Day, throngs of people ventured out to get a piece of the action.

“That’s about all I’m selling today,” said Mike Green, manager of a QuikTrip store in Des Moines. “A lot of people are buying them for gifts.”

At a Kum & Go convenience store in Des Moines, customers bought as many as 100 tickets each.

Richard Nichols, who stopped by before his Christmas dinner, didn’t think it was a big purchase.

“When you don’t buy them very often, it’s not that much,” Nichols said. “We’re just about ready to eat, so I said, ‘I got to do an errand here.’ ”

Ticket sales in Iowa were considerably lower Wednesday than on Christmas Eve, said Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery.

“We expected people to go out and do their last-minute shopping, including their Powerball shopping, [on Tuesday] and then be at home [Wednesday],” Neubauer said.

To help last-minute Powerball players find their way to a ticket seller, the District of Columbia Lottery took out a newspaper ad listing about 90 places open Christmas Day that sell the tickets.

One first-time player, Bill Sanders, 60, of Mission, Kan., bought his ticket Wednesday at a gas station.

If the single ticket he bought was the winner, he said, “I’d probably travel the world and live a lot different than I do now.”

The biggest lottery jackpot in the country’s history was a Big Game prize of $363 million, won in May 2000 by ticket-holders in Michigan and Illinois. The second was a $331-million Big Game jackpot split among three tickets in April this year.