IT APPROACHES...

Yep - it’s the Frozombie Apocalypse, Part Two. Lookee:


Winter Storm Pax bears down on the southeastern United States... with Georgia right in its sights. The arrow points to our location. [Click to embiggen.]

The predictions are more dire than they were for our last wintry weather event, the two-inch snowstorm that brought a mighty metropolitan area to its knees a mere two weeks ago.

That was snow. This will be snow along with a metric buttload of ice, if the predictions are to be believed.

Thick ice is way, way worse than snow. It causes trees to bend and shatter under its weight, bringing down power lines. And it is a fearsome obstacle to all kinds of travel. In the NOAA’s words, “Winter Storm To Result In Impossible Travel Conditions With Widespread and Extended Power Outages.”

Impossible. Travel. Conditions. Holy fuckamoley.

I don’t mind being cooped up in the house. We have adequate provisions of food, drink, and Adult Beverages to get us through several days of inaccessible roadways. But ice storms bring with them the prospect of power outages, which are most assuredly NOT fun in the winter. We have a pretty robust power grid in the immediate neighborhood, but when you’re dealing with an “event of historic proportions” (as described by the fearmongers at the National Weather Service) you’re paddling in uncharted waters.

We’ve dealt with ice storms here before, the last one being nine years ago. And we’ve experienced them in other places as well: New York, Houston and southern Connecticut.

My first Icy Experience was in New York, with a storm that coated my car with a solid half-inch glaze. When I rolled my car window down, a completely intact “window” of ice remained in its place... it was completely impossible to drive even at a fraction of a mile per hour without sliding to the side of the road. (Those were flat streets, never mind the hills and curves of Atlanta.) And the day we began our relocation from Trumbull to Houston back in January 1991, an ice storm struck southern Connecticut. Somehow, the movers managed to get our belongings out of the house intact despite having to skate their way to the moving van.

Ice storms suck.

The good side of all this is that businesses and schools are being way more proactive than they were two weeks ago. The city will be shut down tomorrow. Hell, it was already mostly shut down today, with supermarket shelves having been stripped bare as early as Monday morning. (There was a run on hamburger meat and chicken, either because everyone was sick to death of bread and milk or because the paleo diet is more popular than anybody thought.)

To my fellow Georgians - hunker down and be safe. To everyone else - hope this doesn’t happen to you.