Ice Storm

A winter storm hit central Texas late Tuesday night and brought a whole lot of ice. Far too much ice. Our power went off yesterday morning around 5:30AM and hasn’t come back on yet. The power company says it may be tomorrow evening, but looking at their outage map, it may be longer.

Worse than the lack of power is the damage to our trees. It’s simply devastation, like a tornado or hurricane hit. The huge live oak in our front yard is still standing (please, please stay standing), but it’s lost a lot of limbs. Some of our other trees are worse.

It’s the same all over the neighborhood. Worse, in many cases, because the trees actually split in two or fell over and uprooted. We listened to them crack and fall for two nights, and it was horrible. Driving through the neighborhood is just heartbreaking.

Overall, we’re okay. The house temperature is holding fairly steady in the fifties, and we have sleeping bags to keep us warm at night even if it drops lower. We also have a natural gas stove, so we can cook, which is handy. Last night we made dinner via lantern-light. And today we found out that our gas water heater doesn’t need electricity to run, so we had a hot shower. Heaven!

We went looking for dry ice this morning, now that the roads aren’t dangerous, only to find that everyone else had already beat us to it. Our fridge stuff is toast, but we’re holding out hope for our freezer stuff. It’s in a cooler on the porch now, and most of it was still frozen hard when we transferred it over.

Except the ice cream. We had that for breakfast.

Now we’re hanging out at Mr. M’s office and charging all of our depleted batteries and devices. They have lights and heat and internet! Well, they had internet. As I was typing this is went down, so boo.

Wait, it’s back!

Our phone internet has actually done pretty well this time, much better than during snowpocalypse. It went down for a bit right when the power first went off, but it’s been solid since then, which is helpful because for all of Twitter’s many, many recent issues, it’s still the best way to get up-to-date information from local news and government sources.

And I can refresh the Austin Energy outage map every few minutes to see if the numbers have changed. They haven’t. Nearly thirty-six hours in, there are still 152k people without power, and over 1500 outages. The number of outages keeps climbing, even as the number of affected customers is dropping a tiny bit. They’ve called in help from other utilities, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a slow process.

But the ice is melting today, and if we’re lucky, it won’t refreeze overnight. Then it’s supposed to get warmer, so hopefully the worst is behind us.

Now I just have to hope our trees can recover. 😔

I hope you all are warm and safe!

6 thoughts on “Ice Storm”

  1. Glad you and mister M are okay in this crazy weather. I’m in Fort Worth, and we had more sleet than freezing rain. Then the sleet mixed in with the freezing rain.
    I’m very grateful to work from home and had my electricity throughout this storm. If I had lost electricity, I have backup power to run my internet and work computer.
    Stay warm and safe! Dodge the ice and tree branches if you’re out.

  2. definitely crack a window to provide a path for the moist air in the shower to escape.
    we still haven’t repaired the bathroom ceilings where the moisture had condensed during snowpocalypse way back when…

  3. I hope your trees recover! My husband and I just spent the last hour trying to get the branches down off the top of our storage shed in the back yard. We have an enormous live oak tree that covers our entire backyard in North Austin. Progress was made, but both of us now have frozen and wet fingers so we will have to do more tomorrow when more of the ice has melted.

  4. Glad you’re ok. Seems like Texas has northern Ontario winters without the snow accumulation!! My MIL has a gas generator (connected to the natural gas to the house) to help her out – we weren’t so sure when she bought it and had it installed ($$$$) but it’s been worth it for the times when power is out for a few days at a time. Good Luck! Sounds like you’re surviving climate change!

  5. Put the food in plastic glass or silicon storage containers so animals cant easily get in it, then put it outside, it’s so cold it’ll keep.

  6. My son sent me pics from Austin. He was one of the lucky ones who didn’t lose power. Many of his classmates didn’t have power and still hadn’t got it back when I spoke to him late last week.

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