Greetings from Ice Station Zero




UPDATE 2: 7:18 p.m. at bottom.

It's quiet in the Shipley house this morning. Snow and freezing rain are falling, and I'm watching the Virginia Senate before heading out to the office.

Why is it quiet here? It's just me and the computer today. Forecasters have been crowing about a winter storm for weeks, and today's the day.

The forecast is bad. Real bad.

The National Weather Service said we'd get about an inch of ice. Two inches of ice were responsible for the great Quebec ice storm of 2004, and that disaster turned most of Canada into a dark wasteland for the better part of a month.

So, just to be on the safe side, Barbara and Gracie skedaddled down to Lynchburg on short notice. The forecast for that area was for about a tenth of an inch of ice, plus Dennis and Jean have natural gas heat and a generator. Not so at la fortaleza norteƱa de Shipley. Garren grew up a child of the TVA, so it's all electric here, all the time. The great storm of March 1993 is still fresh in my memory. Two year olds with no power for a couple of days could be tough.

I spoke with Barbara late Monday, and they had arrived safely, well ahead of the storm. At last check Gracie was having a great time.


Daddy got prepared by pulling out and ironing 5 days of clothes, putting up the wipers on the car, making sure the house was clean, and grabbing enough granola bars, canned fruit, and dry cereal to get me through any power-free periods.

The chains are in the car, along with a spiffy survival kit. All the batteries in the house are charged. I've also put together some back-up Internet connections that can keep me online for about four hours without any power or phone service.

Snow started here last night, and so far the roads are clear. In fact, the FedEx guy just dropped off a package for Barbara from Jean (oh well, weather makes fools of us all). If you've got a fast enough connection, you can see what's going on in the Shenandoah Valley by following this link to traffic cameras.

I'll update as the day progresses, but so far, so good.

**Above, a live feed from WJLA's SuperDoppler 7. Strasburg is about halfway between Winchester and the I-81 shield. **Below, the view from the deck at 11:30 a.m. No, I wasn't at work yet, but during the General Assembly session I work from home until the Senate adjourns for the day.

UPDATE

Safely at the office, although the drive over was a bit tricky. If I were the only one on the road, it wouldn't be a problem. Add in idiot yuppies with SUVs that have never driven a 4x4, and things get dicey. Lots of piled up slush everywhere, plus those nasty little ice pellets falling. It sounds like sitting under an hourglass.

I wasn't concerned about the situation until I heard that the federal government was closing at 2 p.m. Then I got this little note from Governor Kaine's office:

RICHMOND — Governor Timothy M. Kaine today declared a statewide emergency, directing state agencies to take all necessary actions to aid in the response to and recovery from severe winter weather forecast to arrive later today in northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.

OK. Now I'm a little concerned.

UPDATE 2

Safely back home after a bit of a white-knuckle ride across town. The roads are coverd with about 3 inches of frozen slush, and the ice pellets keep coming down. As you can see from this photo, things are getting interesting:



I
t took me a while to carve the ice off the windows before I could get underway. While I was working, I heard the Rescue Squad station next door open up as an emergency shelter. That, as they say, is not good.

Watching the news has been instructive tonight. One of our favorite meteorologists in the newsroom is Doug Hill of WJLA 7 in Washington. Around here, he's known as Doug of Doom because of his penchant for painting a grave picture.

Doug of Doom says tonight that the northern half of the Shenandoah Valley should just prepare to be without power for a while. While he may well be right, I'm putting my hopes in the fact that we have underground utilities and I can see the substation where the major transmission lines terminate from the parking lot. That's not a lot of room for a tree to break the chain. We've lost power due to weather one time -- during Hurricane Isabell in 2003 (I think), and that was for about an hour.

I'm about to bake some muffins for breakfast tomorrow (just in case bad things do happen), then crash for a while. It's been a very long day, regardless of the weather.

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