The Storm – Part 1

This year, at the end of the first week of December, North Texas suffered through a record setting ice storm. The amount of ice was horrible (we received 4 inches where I live), but it was the cold that set the records. Longest number of days with low temperatures below freezing. Coldest days of the year. Power usage records, etc. etc. etc.

To me, what was different about this storm was the six straight days with much of the time spent below freezing and the ice just sitting there and not melting. We usually only see ice for a day or so before it starts melting. This time, days passed with the ice still on the roads and covering the ground. Once you got out of the main areas, roads still had ice on them a week later. It was six days before I got out of the house and there was still patches on ice on the roads around my house.

My daughter had to brave the ice to go to work each day after the first few days of staying at home, but she slide all the way there each day. School was out for four days due to the ice – something never heard of around here. I lost a dog pen when the weight of the ice on the cover collapsed the pen’s support poles. Carports, sheds, marina coverings, gas station covers, and roofs of buildings collapsed during the week. The 120 foot fence of a brand new gold driving range started bending when the poles started snapping due to the weight of the ice. Trees are down all over the place. This was a large amount of ice, but it was an unprecedented amount.

While we had ice on the roads for six days and ice still on the ground eleven days later, we never lost power for more than a few minutes. Internet was flaking, but stayed on. Satellite TV lost during the first twenty hours of the storm, but came on and stayed on the rest of the time. Many around the area did lose power for a day, or two, or even three in some cases, but the outage was in small sections and not all over the area. Three hundred thousand lost power out of the millions in the area. But there have been worse power outages before.

We did eat up quite a bit of food we had in the house during those six days of isolation, but we were never in trouble of running out of food or water. Because of the thousands of trucks stranded on the road, a few grocery stores did start to run out of the basics like bread and milk but the store up the road a few miles still had items on the shelf. Gas stations started running out of gas because deliveries could not be made. I’ve haven’t heard of this before in our area. Bad, but not devastating.

The reason I telling you this is that during those times, I started coming up with a little short story based on the storm. Like most writers, I am going to take some liberties and make the storm much worse than it actually was in order to frame the question, “What if the storm was as bad as this? How would everyone cope?”

As usual, this story hasn’t gone through much editing and will have some boo-boos in it. Just ignore them or better yet, let me know about them.

Also, as you read this story ask yourself – What if this type of storm happened to us? Would we make it out in one piece?

Enjoy and I would love to hear your comments.

Steve Matthews was often called the weather geek of channel 6. He wasn’t the chief meteorologist of the station, but he was the one who ran the data sets to produce the forecasts. He understood the models and data sets better than the rest of the on-air talent. They relied on him to make them look good and he never disappointed them. Awards were won because of his accurate forecasts and the station was known around the country for its weather department. The rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth weather forecasters were in envy of him and his skills and the benefits he provided their competitor station. When Steve talked about weather, people around the world listened.

 

“Hey, Professor. You still at it?” Chief meteorologist Henry Ray asked as he walked by the weather room after completing his piece of the ten o’clock news.

 

“Yea. I got some weird results with the last set of data. I’m going to rerun it and then verify with the midnight data. Fun, fun, fun,” Steve replied. He was the one that stayed up before the event, during the event, and after the event. Henry, who used to be a pro baseball player ,had gotten his degree in meteorology, but his talents lay in telling the people the news, not running complex weather models with often screwed up data. That was Steve’s job and passion.

 

“Ok. Try to get home some time tonight. Robin already thinks you are having an affair with Lucy.”

 

“Ha. Ha,” Steve replied. This was running joke between the two. Lucy was what they called their weather computer. Henry always joked that Steve spent more time with his computer than with his wife. The joke then morphed into the ‘affair’.

 

“Later,” Steve said as Lucy beeped. Henry turned and left. He knew once Lucy beeped, Steve would be lost to the world.

 

********

 

Three hours later, Steve looked at the results of running the last three sets of data. What he saw was not good. The different models they used were all coming together and showing a major event for next weekend. The numbers were changing so much between the data sets that Steve wondered if someone was screwing them up.

 

“Might as well go home,” he said to himself. “I’m not going to make any predictions from these until I get on the line with the guys in Oklahoma. These numbers have to be off.”

 

The entire drive home, Steve reviewed his results in his mind. If the results held up, then they were looking at a record setting storm in five days. He would only be able to review one or two more data sets before he had to call it one way or another. He already screwed up once in his career by predicting a major snow storm which never happened. Scores of hateful phone calls, letters, emails, and visits by city and state officials had soured him on calling anything too radical. He found out that in the real-world, it was easier to miss a storm than predict it and be wrong. He would get another round of data at noon and if things looked the same, he would call around to his group of weather geeks to see what they were thinking. There was nothing more he could do tonight and if it was true, he would need to bank up on all the sleep he could before the thing hit. They would spend days in the office during these long storms trying to keep everyone safe.

 

********

 

The next evening, Henry stopped back by Steve’s desk. “Are you still at it? Did you even go home?”

 

“I went home, but these results are too much to ignore. I’m going to run the numbers again as soon as they come in. Everyone’s standing by to compare notes on our results as soon as the computers spit them out.”

 

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?”

 

“My whole group, as well as the folks from Oklahoma City, NOAA, NWS, Dr. Phillips, and his crew.”

 

Henry looked at Steve and sat down, “What are you not telling me? What is so important that this entire group is staying up in the middle of the night for and waiting for the results? Spill it.”

 

Steve looked at his boss and took a deep breath. “The numbers have been getting worse each time we run them. At first, it was just another event which would cause the standard blizzards in the plains, heavy snow in the Mid-West, Great Lakes and Northeast. Minor icing around here and maybe throughout the Southeast and parts of the Mid-Atlantic before turning to snow. Something to worry about, but nothing earth-shattering.”

 

“And now?”

 

“The numbers are showing something different.”

 

“Better or worse?”

 

“Worse.”

 

“How much worse?”

 

Steve looked down and took a series of deep breaths. After he had fortified himself to give Henry the news, he began. “Right now, if the numbers are right and hold up over the next two runs, we think that this will be a major record-setting event. Something that I don’t think has ever been recorded in North America. I don’t want to make any guesses on the actuals right now, but they will be the worse you have ever heard of.”

 

“Make the predictions,” Henry said with his ‘coaches’ voice they often called it. It was an order, not a suggestion and Steve knew it.

 

“Ninety to ninety-three percent of the country will suffer a record event. Three or more feet of snow for the plains, Mid-West, Mid-Atlantic, and southern New England. Four feet or more for northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Snow will be on the ground as far south as the Red River here, northern Florida, San Diego, and the Arizona – Mexico border. Parts of the Great Lakes will see ten feet or more of lake effect snow. Mountain areas in the western states and the eastern states will have six to ten feet of new snow. All roads between the Cascades and the Eastern seaboard will be covered with at least three feet or more of snow with drifts up to then feet. Nothing will move.”

 

Henry’s jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Steve and the weather geeks around the country were predicating the heaviest snowfall ever recorded in North America. “What else are you not telling me? What about here? What do we need to tell our viewers?”

 

Steve let out a breath. “We think that anything to the west of the Cascades, including all of the California coast all the way down to the Mexican border will have three or more inches of ice. Atlanta and the gulf coast will see ice as well. Miami may even see ice.”

 

He stopped for a moment. “We are predicating ten to twelve inches of ice for the north central Texas. Six inches in San Antonio and one or two inches in Houston. Ice will cover all of Texas down to the border with Corpus Christi getting at least an inch.”

 

“Did you say ten to twelve inches?” Henry croaked. “Can you imagine the devastation that will cause?”

 

“Yes. I can. It will be like a bomb has gone off over most of the state. Every tree will break apart. Every wooden telephone pole and electrical pole will snap. Metal ones will bend under the weight. Radio towers, cell towers, and high voltage tower will collapse. The whole state and most of the country will be without power during this storm. And no, the highest ice total recorded was eight inches in northern Idaho. No one around to suffer from the damage. Texas and New York have seen six inches from single storms in the 40′s. Isolated areas and not the amount of damage we are going to see.”

 

“Don’t forget,” Henry took over, “every building with a large flat roof will collapse from the weight of that much ice. Any thinly support structure like car ports, gas station covers, metal garages and buildings, mobile homes, and probably more than a few older or badly constructed homes will collapse. This is going to be a disaster.”

 

“That’s not all,” Steve interrupted, “it gets worse.”

 

“What? How could it get worse?”

 

“The front will come in on Thursday evening and drop temperatures below freezing all the way into Mexico. It will be in the upper teens here before a tropical storm comes in from the west and starts dumping rain. That is what the reason for the large amount of ice. What is bad is that another boost of cold air will arrive after the precipitation. This will keep everything below freezing for at least one hundred and eighty hours. Nothing will melt for over a week. We will be paralyzed.”

 

“Good, God!” Henry responded. “A week with ten to twelve inches of ice covering everything. I can’t imagine the loss of life.” Henry lowered his head into his hands with the imagines of what was about to come. People were used to one, two, or even three days of bad weather and would gripe, but they would cope. A week of below freezing with that much ice. Hundreds will die from medical issues, car accidents trying to get to jobs that their employers insist they attended or get fired. Hundreds will die from house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning when they try to keep their families warm. He could even see the headlines of entire families found dead in their cars when they piled into them in the garage and turned them on and found out they couldn’t open their garage doors because of the ice.

 

“There’s more,” Steven weakly said.

 

Henry looked up with disbelief in his eyes. “More?”

 

“Yes. It is too far out to confirm, but it looks like there will be another major Artic front coming in. We may have one or two days with a few hours above freezing before the next one hits. It looks as strong as this one, but without the precipitation. It may keep us frozen for another one hundred to two hundred hours.”

 

“Wait? Three weeks of below freezing weather with ten inches or more of ice on top of us?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Ok. I’m calling in everyone right now. We need to prepare to alert the public. When is anyone going public with this?”

 

“The first results should be in around one am. They will start the soft warnings then and build up the warnings over the next twenty hours. The full scope of this will not be made public until Tuesday afternoon. They want to try to keep the panic down as much as they can by slowing increasing the dangers of this storm. Hopefully, some people will listen and prepare starting tomorrow and the number of panic buyers on Tuesday will be manageable.”

 

“Any word on what the feds and state are going to do?”

 

“Nope. They should get the word right after this data set so they can prepare.”

 

“Ok. What do I need to do to help?”

 

“Order some pizzas and call your wife and let her know. She’s going to have to prep for a three week storm. I’m about to call mine right now.”

 

Henry looked at Steve with a “you’re shitting me right?” look on his face. He sat there waiting for someone to jump out of the shadows and laugh at the prank they just pulled on him. He just couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

 

“Since you are having a hard time with this, here is the chat that is going on,” Steve said showing Henry his screen. Everything looked real to Henry. If this was a joke, it was an elaborate one. The problem was that Steve was not a joking type person. He too serious and fit the personality of a number, crunching, geeky professor. Always serious and never much fun to be around.

 

Steve got up from his chair, “Call your wife. I’m going to call mine right now.” He walked out of the room to find a place for some privacy.

 

A few minutes later with a cell phone up to his ear, Steve said. “Honey, I need you to wake up and listen to me.”

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