Damn that global warming. *heh*
My Wonder Woman reported to me that the secretary at her M-W-F school greeted everyone as they arrived this morning with, “Happy Friday!”
Yep. Snow forecast for America’s Third World County–up to a foot by tomorrow afternoon/evening, over ice and around 2″ of sleet as a base.
Bearing that in mind, and recalling the Great Ice Storm of 2007, which took out power for much of the county for most of January that year, around noon today I began rounding up supplies. A propane-fueled camp stove and the appropriately-sized bottles of fuel, oil lamps, etc. If power goes out again, we may once again need to travel out of town–out of county–for my Wonder Woman to complete grad work assignments (just hunting up a hot spot),since we no longer have a backup dialup service, but for other needs, we should be OK. Sure, with temps projected to go as low as -6 Fahrenheit, I’ll need to keep the water running a wee tad to avoid freezing pipes if we love power, but that’d be a small price to pay.
Everything’s pretty well weatherproofed here at twc central. We have ice chests for moving fridge stuff outside for keeping, if power’s out too long. Plenty of propane for the camp stove and as long as we have water, the hot water heater (natural gas) will help warming the core of the house. (Help keep the pipes unfrozen, too, as hot/cold pipes are run very closely together.) Worked well enough during the bitterly cold weather in January 2007 when power was out here at twc central for a couple of weeks.
Of course, there is that client who needs onsite help out in the boonies on Tuesday afternoon. I may have to defer that, knowing just how steep and rough her nearly 1/4 mile drive is. Sadly, the roads to her house are less navigable in icy/snowy road conditions now than in 2007, since they’re now blacktopped. Icy/snowy dirt and gravel roads are often easier to drive in icy/snowy conditions. Oh, well.
Anywho… twc may be offline (or not) intermittently, for “weather days”. We’ll see.
Mini-micro-update: Banner streaming across TV screen has darned near everything in a six-county (four-state) area canceled already, except for the local schools here in America’s Third World County.
Luckily for us it’s been sleeting/freezing misting all day but hasn’t really built up. We’re predicted to get 8-15″. I think down south is supposed to get more.
I’m okay getting lots of snow but I want it to be enough that there is no question of being able to get out and then I want it to go away in a couple of days. 😛
Stay safe, stay warm!
Down here in Houston we’ve been warned that there will be 4 days of hard freeze in a row. This is a problem around here where plumbing isn’t protected the same as it is up north. Pipes freeze and then burst doing lots of damage so lots of folks let water drip or run slow which makes for low water pressure and other issues.
We even have a chance of frozen precipitation Thursday and on into Friday according to one forecast. If that happens Houston will shut down; it’s so rare folks don’t know how to do anything in it.
Hope you have some food storage, emergency power, emergency source of heat and so on just in case it’s needed.
TF, no emergency power generator–something I’ve needed another “Round To-it” to get around to (although I have some buds with a bunch back in the warehouse section of their lil “fell-off-a-truck” store, if it came to that). We survived better than 2 weeks of sub freezing (many sub-zero) days with no power to our central heating fan. No freezing pipes. Good insulation on plumbing and house in general, so it actually stayed 20-30 degrees warmer inside than out, which meant that as long as we stayed well-bundled, we were fine, too.
And, as I said, the hot water heater worked as long as we had water… but… most of the lil towns around here use well water, stored in towers, and the towers needed to be pumped full…with electrical power, of course. Sadly, the area towns were reduced to sharing a generator, so there were times when water pressure… almost wasn’t. *heh* But as long as we had water pressure, we had hot water, and the hot water, bleeding both humidity and heat helped keep things bearable.
Oil lamps, etc., and we were fine for a couple of weeks “camping out”.
For y’all: pipe heating “tape”–usually available at home improvement stores, applied to your more exposed pipes, spout covers for outside spigots, etc., are last minute measures that can avert freezing pipes.
Newsflash, Nicole: school has been canceled here in America’s Third World County. The ice buildup that’s already taken place was enough. Since the county’s made great efforts a couple of years ago to “upgrade” so many rural roads with blacktop, the ice will be a worse problem for bus routes than the old gravel roads were. The way things look, and given the cutbacks in road maintenance in just the last year, the roads will likely keep schools closed for the rest of the week. 🙂 We’ll stay safe and warm–you do too!