ice storm

Here's a story that was running on the newswire today:

ATLANTA - Freezing rain and ice jolted the South on Thursday, closing schools, snarling traffic and knocking out power to about 300,000 customers from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C.

The outages were caused by ice — up to half an inch thick — that formed on tree limbs and fell onto power lines. About 190,000 were reported without power in western North Carolina and South Carolina's upstate, 57,000 in the Atlanta area and nearly 50,000 across parts of northeast Georgia.

Ten school systems were closed in Georgia and more than a dozen closed in North Carolina, where mountain communities in the western part of the state were told to expect 1 to 3 inches of snow and sleet.

The weather also caused delays of more than an hour at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Forecasters expected the temperatures to increase above freezing across much of the region by Thursday afternoon, but then dip back into the 20s overnight.

Here where I live in Eastern NC we had freezing rain and a slight dip in temperatures around dawn which froze water on trees and powerlines but it wasn't as bad as for the folk south and west of us. Isolated power outages and some bad driving but that's about it here.

The pictures here are from an ice storm we had in December of 2002.

3 years ago we had it much worse. That time much of the area was without electricity for 3 days and some places for as long as 10 days. I had no power for 7 days. Fortunately I was still living in an apartment then. Since then I've bought a house out in the boonies My house is on a well so not having electricity would mean no running water and that's a pain in the butt.

Right now I'm doing a drug treatment experiment that requires harvesting flasks of cells every 8 or 16 hours so I need to be here at odd times. I really hope that the weather doesn't get any worse since if it looks like I won't be able to drive on the roads, I'll have to sleep here . Science--a hard taskmaster! LOL