Ice Storm 2/22

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I know a lot of people here are dealing with this. How are things in your area?

I’m in Memphis. We’ve had freezing rain since late last night. I had a terrible bout of insomnia and couldn’t sleep. Around 6 a.m. I heard what I thought was a clap of thunder but then realized something had hit the roof. I checked the attic and nothing had come through. Of course at that point, I was wide awake. When it got light I looked outside but didn’t see anything laying against the house.

I have huge trees on three sides - one of my own and two belonging to my back and side neighbors. I haven’t gone outside yet to check it out because it’s still pouring rain. But things are looking bad. Everything is covered in ice. Bushes are bent over. And it’s going to do this all day.

Shit. The lights just blinked. Damn. I hear transformers exploding. Fuck. I so hope my power stays on.

2

I think there must be a lot more than 50K without power in the whole state, as there are 30K with outages in San Antonio alone. However, for us, we normally have outages even if there’s only a little rain… so this isn’t surprising.

The utility in San Antonio puts an excellent, highly informative outage map on the internet that is continuously updated in real time. So if you’re sitting in the dark, you can study it on your phone, cursing and hoping.

3

We were supposed to get freezing rain, but the temperature never dropped. So far it is just raining.

4

I grew up in Memphis. In the winter of '73 (I think, it was a long time ago) we had an ice storm that woke me on a Saturday morning (funny on what stuff you remember, but I know it was Saturday as there was no school to cancel). Crashing noises. I was annoyed because I thought it was little kids playing, knocking icicles off the eaves. It turned out to be tree limbs crashing on the roof and around the house.

The power went out later that day. It stayed out for three days (and we lived in highly fashionable East Memphis). They eventually closed the schools on Monday. Three days with no power in freezing weather. At least we had a fireplace.

@aurora_maire , I hope your power doesn’t go out, and if it does, they get it back on quickly.

5

Best wishes to you and everyone else impacted. The storm will be gone by the time it gets cold enough here to do anything other than rain.

At least one of the ornamental trees here still hasn’t recovered from being bent by 2010’s Snowmageddon.

6

I just ventured out to take a look at the roof and there is nothing up there. Maybe I really did hear a clap of thunder. But it sure sounded like it was right over my head. So yay! There are several small branches in the yard, maybe one of those bounced off the roof. And while I was out, I heard a snap and saw about 1/3 of a tree in a neighbor’s backyard crash down. I hope it wasn’t near their house. The outage map shows 70,000 without power. My lights still blink once in a while but power is holding so far. Forecast is for freezing rain for 9 more hours.

Edit - I heard a crash that sounded close and like it did hit a house. I went to look our the living room window and just then 3 branches fell from my tree and bounced off the roof. This is making me so nervous.

7

Ohio. We’re supposed to get a foot of snow up by the lake, but right now, it’s only 2 inches with a very fine snow coming down.

8

This might be looking for zebras when you hear hoofbeats, but could also have been an ice quake? We get those every so often here and they can sound like a bomb going off.

9

But, but, but…didn’t Abbot promise that you guys wouldn’t lose power again?

I hope everyone stays warm and safe and this goes for homes too!

10

Yeah, like the vile POS that he is, he has walked that promise back but will probably not suffer politically for it.

In TX myself and have not lost power - yet, anyway - but two of my coworkers have been without power for a few hours now.

11

I’m in Austin, freezing rain but so far power has held up nicely.

12

So now they’re saying temperatures will drop overnight and we’ll awaken to ice.

13

I checked Entergy’s outage map for my state.

Roughly 300. Could be much worse. Depends on what happens in the next 12 hours.

Highway Dept has the major roads cleared. Hoping we don’t get more snow this evening.

14

There are still 17K households without power in San Antonio, down from 30K a few hours ago.

Would y’all mind saying where you are – rat least the state (besides the states of anxiety) if you don’t want to get specific. Thx.

15

No ice here. But we’re expecting a foot of snow tonight through morning.

16

It looks like the temps should be around zero for that to happen. We’ve been hovering at 32 since last night. I think it must have been thunder. I heard some a little while ago.

17

There is a U.S. power outage map; it looks like outages are worse in Tennessee, specifically the Memphis area:

18

Mine’s in my profile. As for rats… :wink:

19

We’ve gotten a respite from the rain and things have calmed down. I did have two big limbs fall in the backyard, away from the house. My wonderful neighbor David is out picking up the smaller stuff from everyone’s yards. I was talking to him on the porch when a big limb fell from my tree into the street and he got that up on the curb.

There are about 120,000 outages as of 1 p.m. CST.

20

So far, so good here in North Texas. Still have power, have some ice, sleet and snow, but that’s all. Working from home, which is made more annoying because my kids are now home today and tomorrow, and there’s some boundary-teaching going on w.r.t. coming in and bugging me on conference calls, etc…

I suspect that most of the power outages in Lamar, Fannin, Hunt and Delta counties (the cluster in NE Texas) aren’t due to any sort of ERCOT shenanigans, but rather because that’s where the bad weather last night/this morning was the worst. It’s more than likely downed lines because of ice accumulation and that sort of thing. The TV meteorologists were even warning about that sort of thing up there as early as Tuesday night in fact.

So as much as I loathe Abbott and the Texas GOP, I don’t think that the power outages up there can be laid at their feet; this kind of thing just happens with this kind of weather.