| County misses worst part of snowstorm | | Posted: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 9:03 pm
| From AP, staff reports
The four to six inches of snow that was to hit Obion County overnight did not materialize.
Union City employees at the A.L. Strub Wastewater Treatment Plant recorded only .05 inches of snow, which began falling here early this morning.
The Obion County Sheriff’s Department reported limbs down on several roadways in the western portion of the county and the Obion County Highway Department and Obion County Rescue Squad assisted in clearing them this morning. No weather-related reports had been filed at the Union City Police Department as of press time this morning.
About 60 Gibson Electric Membership Corporation members’ homes and businesses in and around Union City were affected by an outage Tuesday night. The outage began at 7:35 p.m. and service was restored at 10:24 p.m. A second outage affected 270 members from the Polk Station area. The outage began at 10:13 p.m. and was restored at 11:51 p.m. Both outages were caused by wind, according to a GEMC employee.
There were no problems with the Union City Electric System.
Other areas of the country were not as lucky.
The death toll rose today to six with car accidents on snow and sleet-slickened highways in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Post-Christmas travelers braced for flight delays and a raft of weather warnings for drivers, a day after rare winter twisters damaged buildings in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Snow blew across southern Illinois and southern Indiana early today as the storm tracked up the Ohio River valley toward the Eastern seaboard and New England.
There were whiteout conditions in parts of southwestern Indiana, where six inches or more of snow had fallen by midmorning around Evansville. State police reported dozens of vehicles stuck after not being able to get up a hill on a central Indiana highway, while some roads around Evansville were impassable, with wind gusts around 30 mph.
A blizzard warning was in effect for much of the state’s southern two-thirds and more than a dozen counties issued travel watches, asking residents to make only essential driving trips.
“People need to not travel. They need to just go where they’re going to be and stay there,” said Rachel Trevino, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service bureau in Paducah, Ky., which covers southwestern Indiana.
In snowy Arkansas, the storm left more than 189,000 customers without electricity today, utility Entergy Arkansas said.
Severe thunderstorms were forecast for the Carolinas while a line of blizzard and winter storm warnings stretched from Arkansas up the Ohio River to New York and on to Maine.
Thirty-four tornadoes were reported in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama during the outbreak Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.
Rick Cauley’s family was hosting relatives for Christmas when tornado sirens went off in Mobile. Not taking any chances, he and his wife, Ashley, hustled everyone down the block to take shelter at the athletic field house at Mobile’s Murphy High School in Mobile.
It turns out, that wasn’t the place to head.
“As luck would have it, that’s where the tornado hit,” Cauley said. “The pressure dropped and the ears started popping and it got crazy for a second.” They were all fine, though the school was damaged, as were a church and several homes, but officials say no one was seriously injured.
Camera footage captured the approach of the large funnel cloud.
Mobile was the biggest city hit by numerous twisters. Along with brutal, straight-line winds, the storms knocked down countless trees, blew the roofs off homes and left many Christmas celebrations in the dark. Torrential rains drenched the region and several places saw flash flooding.
More than 750 flights around the U.S. were canceled as of this morning, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com.
The cancelations were mostly spread around airports that had been or soon would be in the path of the storm.
Holiday travelers in the nation’s much colder midsection battled treacherous driving conditions from freezing rain and blizzard conditions from the same fast-moving storms. In Arkansas, highway department officials said the state was fortunate the snowstorm hit on Christmas Day when many travelers were already at their destinations.
Published in The Messenger 12.26.12 | | | | |
