Ark. emergency management officials gear up for intense winter stormThe storm is expected to bring 3 to 5 inches of freezing rain, sleet and snow and up to a half-inch of ice accumulation
By Robert J. Smith
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Emergency management officials on Tuesday geared up for the expected arrival Thursday of freezing rain, sleet and snow.
Weather forecasters suggested the wicked system will have a tough time matching the intensity of last January's ice storm, which caused nine deaths, knocked out power to 350,000 Arkansas homes and businesses, downed thousands of trees and left north Arkansas communities critically short of water.
However, this round is expected to bring 3-5 inches of freezing rain, sleet and snow and up to a half-inch of ice accumulation that could be heavy enough to drag down power lines.
"It's looking like it's going to be dicey somewhere," said meteorologist Kenneth Jackson with the National Weather Service office in Tulsa. "The exact zone is tough to nail down." Tuesday's bull's-eye was on Washington County, but the prediction was so far ahead of the storm that the most severe weather could actually occur 50 miles north or south of there, Jackson said.
Dave Maxwell, director of the state Department of Emergency Management, said forecasters gave conflicting reports about where the worst weather will whack Arkansas.
One forecast showed the 15-18 counties stretching across the northernmost part of the state would see ice accumulations of a quarter-inch to a half-inch, while another forecast suggested the freezing rain and ice would slip farther south and the state's northernmost counties would be blanketed with heavy snow, Maxwell said.
"It's safe to say that we're going to get a significant event across the north half of the state," Maxwell said. "We look at ice as the worst." A winter storm watch will be in effect from Thursday morning through Friday morning. The heaviest precipitation is expected Thursday night, the weather service said.
Arkansans were preparing for trouble.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency promised to ship 50 diesel-fueled power generators from Texas to Arkansas late today on six flat-bed trucks. Maxwell said he hasn't decided yet where to stage those generators that'll be used - if necessary - to power public water and sewer systems and other critical infrastructure.
"We want to beat the weather but wait as long as possible," Maxwell said of his desire to place the generators in the areas expected to be hardest hit. "The weather service has a fairly low confidence in their forecast right now, and we'll be watching that closely." Power providers will be helped somewhat by last January's storm, which pulled down the weakest trees and limbs, said Ozarks Electric Cooperative spokesman Penny Storms. Without those high limbs to fall and knock down wires, ice on the lines themselves is most likely to cause power failures, Storms said.
The company will be quick to contact other electric companies to seek help if power fails in Northwest Arkansas, she said. Power companies often send linemen to other areas to help restore power.
Ozarks Electric has a more established system than it did last year for moving equipment such as power poles, insulators and other hardware to the areas where they'll be needed. Last January's storm at its worst left 53,600 of Ozarks' 64,000 customers in a nine-county area of Oklahoma and Arkansas without power, Storms said.
"We've learned to ask for help early and not try to weather the storm," she said. "We want to call when it becomes apparent that we're going to get the brunt of the storm." Joe Shipman, the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department's district engineer at Fort Smith, called Thursday's weather "an imminent storm with accumulation." However, he said he'd have to wait before deciding where to station crews.
The Highway Department isn't sure it'll be able to pretreat bridges with calcium chloride, the slurry brine put out before frozen precipitation falls. If the precipitation starts as rain, it washes away the calcium chloride, Shipman said.
"We don't predict," Shipman said. "We just observe and we react." Maxwell scheduled a telephone conference call today with Arkansas county judges and county emergency management officials.
"We want to make sure they communicate their needs early on," Maxwell said. ""There's been a lot of work done and lessons learned since that last ice storm."
|
Most Commented Articles