Greetings and welcome!

7pm

It looks like there was a little more tree damage than was obvious from my window. A friend said that there were a lot of trees down on the town road on the way to the gas station.

About 6pm the power went out here. I am now on generator power and cell phone internet. As I was setting up the generator I noticed that a branch had fallen onto my truck. If the storm took down a branch this big from a healthy oak I have to believe that there are a lot of trees and branches down. The branch was about as big as a salad plate, not quite a foot across. I couldn’t move it by hand, I had to drag it off with the other truck and a strap. Looks like I got lucky on the damage, but I’m not sure about the windshield.

The public service power outage numbers have only changed a little. They have multiple crews doing their best. As they get stuff fixed more lines keep going down like in my case. WPS has excellent line crews and they get the job done.

At 6:45pm it was misting and raining lightly.

4:30pm

Not much has changed. We are in a quiet area of the storm and have been for much of the afternoon. Reports of trees and branches down are very common. Silver Cliff still has 547 people out of power, and Athelstane has 923. People are reporting power being restored, but the outage reports keep coming in, so it doesn’t change the numbers that much. Crews are in the area working.

The roads were pretty ugly today according to FaceBook reports. Again the crews have been out. Salted roads will improve quickly. Salt is very effective at 32F. Untreated roads will be ice with an inch or three of snow on them.

There is more precipitation coming for tonight. With temperatures right at 32 it is a guess if it will be freezing rain, rain, or snow. The storm is losing intensity, so I wouldn’t expect quite as much as last night.

10:30am

The rain has changed to snow and we have about 2″ down. It is still raining with a little snow.

The ice on the trees held the snow, and that is gathering rain. There are a lot of power outages in the area. One friend said the she went outside and she could hear tree branches cracking and breaking when the wind blew. I have a lot of small branches down but no big ones yet.

As far as power outages Silver cliff has 12 outages affecting 498 people. Athelstane has 7 outages affecting 702 people.

The power line crews around here are amazing, and are on the job so it won’t take too long and they will have everyone squared away.

The latest forecast has the rain/snow/sleet/freezing rain continuing into tomorrow. We could see 3″ of snow today.

I have not been out so I can’t tell you how the roads are.

5:30am

We are in the midst of an incredibly strong spring storm. It is a Gulf of Mexico powered monster that is covering a large part of the central US. It even spawned a large tornado that went through New Orleans, and I am sure that there was other severe weather down south.

Closer to home we have been right on the edge of freezing. Starting about 8pm last night it began raining chunks of ice. It accumulated on the roads and made a crusty glaze. The temperature has been right on the border of letting it freeze onto the surface, so it wasn’t quite a traditional ice storm. It varied from spot to spot as even the slightest change in temperature made it icy or wet. What a crazy storm.

I can still hear those ice pellets and rain drops hitting the chimney cap this morning. Looking out the window I see a little ice accumulation, but not a lot. The NWS was expecting about 0.2″ of ice accumulation, and that looks about right.

This is a storm where even the most minor change in temperatures will change a lot in the way of ice accumulation. I suspect that even 10 miles away the ice accumulation would be more or less. Switching my NWS forecast location to Goodman they are looking for 0.3″ of  ice and 1/2″ of snow.

In the time that it took me to write that the temperature has dropped just a little and now the ice is starting to accumulate more. There is a hefty glaze on the deck and trees out back. The reason that I know that is that I heard a branch drop and I went to take a look. The view was different than it was even 45 minutes ago.

I don’t know how it ends yet. Will it go up a degree or two and melt off? Will it continue to accumulate ice and start dropping tree branches and power lines? I don’t know. I’d bet that the unsalted roads are treacherous though.

One thing that the storm hasn’t done is snow. That is probably a good thing. This is such a massive storm with so much moisture that we would likely have several feet of the stuff, and it would likely be wet and heavy. The upper atmosphere temperatures are too warm for snow, so that is not an issue at the moment.

We just had a power outage where the lights went off for a few seconds and came back on so I am going to get this posted while I can. Looking at the deck I am seeing the ice adding up. It is about 1/4″ or so, maybe a little more. It would not surprise me if my next update was generator powered.

More to follow.

RJB