A fairly entertaining blizzard blew in early today and decided to hang around. Power was on and off all day. But the best came after sundown… early in the day the snow had covered the sat dish and wiped out reception; I didn’t pay it much mind, as I was trying to get somethings done. After nightfall I went out with a stick to knock the snow off… which had turned into a big slab of ice. So while I was whacking away at the ice with a 2X2, the sky suddenly lit it bright blue for a millisecond, and the lights in the house flickered. Then the sky lit up *really* bright with a blue-green flash, and the power stayed off for hours. I’m guessing that a transformer blew itself to bits somewhere nearby, or some similar physical unpleasantness with the local power supply. It’s always interesting when, well into the dark of night, the sky flashes bright blue.
5 Responses to “Whiteout”
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Reminds me of this picture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peacekeeper-missile-testing.jpg
Was it really windy out when this happened? We had an incident like this years back when a ice storm covered the electrical lines with such a thick layer of snow and ice that the wind was blowing them into each other and causing them to short…. the whole city looked like a green fireworks display.
They are designed to shut off if they experience three momentary shorts in a short period on time.
> Was it really windy out when this happened?
Less so than it had been during the daylight hours, but there was a noticable breeze. During the day the temperature was bout freezing, sometimes a bit above; the result being not just snow cover but ice once the temperature plummeted.
That should work the other way around, with the freezing rain showing up first, then the snow as the temperature dropped; you might have been experiencing an air inversion with rain falling from warmer clouds above, and freezing on stuff as it hit the low temperatures near the ground.
They showed Utah’s blizzard on the network news tonight; we’ve got one going on up here at the moment also (related group of storms), with a 100 vehicle pileup having occurred on Interstate 94 near Fargo.
The snow was pretty wet all day. When the temp dropped, the wet and sloshy snow turned to solid ice.