Some people.....
One thing we get very little of here in CO is freezing rain.
I'd rather have 2 feet of snow than one inch of freezing rain. It's pretty amazing that so little ice can bring down those big long haul high tension power lines.
The power company down there says they've had to replace over 275 miles of the stuff. That's what took so long. None of their vendors keeps that much of it in stock.
They were working 3 shifts to get it replaced. Oh people were bitching, but nobody got too squirrelly. It is downstate IL after all. You can get away with looting in Chicago but south of I-80 you're far more likely to get your backside shot off than make off with a sixer of Heineken.
So by and large folks helped each other out. IEMA was there and we dispatched some of the State assets we're responsible for tracking but there wasn't any big call for FEMA to show up.
At the height of it there were something like 200,000 people affected in one way or another.
Well that's one more subject I can add to my Preparedness Training Seminars anyway.
L
“I'd rather have 2 feet of snow than one inch of freezing rain.”
Agreed. I remember one winter in the mid nineties when there was a freezing rainstorm every week for about two months. We didn’t loose too many power lines but the constant coating of ice took its toll. It took more than a year to resurface all the damaged roadways.
But then here in "Bawlmure, Murrland" we panic over any weather. A month ago they closed schools early on the “forecast” of heavy rain. A few weeks ago schools were closed and events cancelled because of fog.
Interestingly though, we have some reason to be fearful of Winter storms because while there are really big snows out West, historically most of the biggest, costliest and deadliest blizzards occur along the East Coast from the Mid-Atlantic up through New England – probably so costly due to the concentrated population centers. These coastal storms are very unpredictable and often develop and flare up almost overnight.
http://nsidc.org/snow/blizzard/storms.html
http://www.mce.k12tn.net/disasters/major_blizzards.htm
I don’t worry about storms coming at us from the West, rather in Winter, I look to the South for the low pressure to the Gulf for moisture and to Canada for the cold because when all those come together, you get a classic Nor’Easter; basically an extro-tropical Hurricane with snow. You just haven’t lived until you been through Thunder Snow!
The worst I’ve lived through to date was '93. But ‘77,'78,‘83 and “03 were pretty bad too.
But while these blizzards were a major inconvenience for me, I can’t imagine living without electricity for so long. The last time that sort of thing happened here was hurricane Isabell.